AccuRev for Developers


Zero-Downtime Development

You're driven to create quality code. You often work on multiple projects simultaneously, using traditional methodologies on some projects, agile methodologies on others.

You juggle multiple workspaces for these different projects, interfacing and integrating code from developers in the next cubicle, at home, half-way around the planet, and consultants who come and go during the project lifecycle. What's most important to you is zero downtime: if the process needs changing, or a build's broken, or patches and customer one-offs need to be propagated, you still want to code at top speed.

Architectural Advantages for Distributed and Parallel Development

AccuRev understands. Our unique feature support for distributed and parallel development offers you an unprecedented advantage over traditional SCM tools.

With AccuRev's parallel development support, you won't need to wait on your fellow developers, thanks to the magic of optimistic locking, a stream-based architecture, and private workspaces. If conflicts do arise, AccuRev provides strong diff and merge tools, and a detailed file change history.

Unlike other SCM products, AccuRev recognizes a configuration as a first-class entity, one that changes over time. These entities are called streams, to indicate how changes flow from one stream to another; downstream changes are inherited from the parent stream. AccuRev's stream-based architecture is superior to the file-based branch and label products of other SCM vendors: AccuRev customers realize increased developer productivity and reduced administrative costs as a result.

streambrowserWith AccuRev, your private changes can propagate when they are ready into a separate integration or team stream. The team may choose to provision the stream with a customized staging process for testing and approval of changes. AccuRev's management tools guarantee that your changes are part of change-sets, which make it into the build in their entirety; partial changes will never show up in the build or in your workspaces.

Most important, AccuRev's ease of use means that your schedule won't be adversely affected by changes to the team's process as your projects mature.

Transparently Works With Your Tools and Processes

You value the tools and techniques you've learned over the years. The last thing you need is a product that doesn't work with your tools, your processes and your personal techniques-your personal style. AccuRev works with you-your IDEs, your issue trackers, your processes. We're committed to maintaining our best-of-breed position through focused integration with other leading products. With our open architecture, open APIs, open XML use, and command-line interface, we already interface with.
  • Eclipse
  • Microsoft® Visual Studio®
  • IBM Rational® ClearQuest®
  • TechExcel DevTrack™
  • and more

Unlike other SCM tools, AccuRev helps organizations dynamically balance the business need for visibility, control and accountability and developers' needs for ease of use, flexibility and productivity. A developer is generally up and running with AccuRev in days, not weeks as with other SCM tools. Change package and issue tracking is tightly integrated, requiring minimal training (typically one day) for tracking and grouping all changes. AccuRev's SCM innovations have made life easier for the developer, not harder. Four simple commands are all most developers will need to learn: Keep, Promote, Update, and Merge.

Enabling Efficiency for All Developers

You need to get your changes in, but someone has destabilized the main codeline. Perhaps it's due to a broken build, or maybe the process has changed yet again to enable Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Or perhaps the new team in Bangalore has come onboard, and their changes moved in while you were sleeping. True performance, true efficiency is about optimizing these complex scenarios, in addition to how fast an SCM system can do a checkin, or create a branch.

AccuRev helps developers be more efficient through its unique streams-based architecture. Streams allow developers to create as many private workspaces as they need to get their work done. To get started, the only thing they need to know is which parent stream their workspace should be based on. By creating a workspace based on that parent stream, developers automatically have the correct view of the files to work on; they do not need to run a script to piece together their workspace. When developers have changes they are ready to make public, they simply do a promote operation that automatically propagates the changes into the parent stream. There is no chance for changes to go into the wrong stream. This reduces errors, which improves quality, reduces rework, and increases productivity.

Moreover, workspaces have full versioning capabilities, including private versioning, convenient search capabilities, easy diff and merge, history, rollback, code reviews, and the ability to work on the same files on multiple machines and platforms at the same time out of the box. A developer can check out the same file into multiple different workspaces, perhaps to work on different bugfixes, and a long-term enhancement as the schedule allows. Finally, a developer can merge easily across multiple different private workspaces.

Users won't have to wait during "code freeze" either. AccuRev makes creating a new stream and merging so painless that users can be working on new development in parallel with stabilizing a release. As changes are made in the stabilization stream, they can be easily merged into new development with the Change Palette. Since stabilizing a release may take a long time, removing the wait on future development during "code freeze" can dramatically improve productivity during this time.