History Annotation
In contrast with other engineering disciplines, software development often involves virtual objects like source code files, compilers and binary files. Since files change at a rapid pace in modern development environments, developers and managers need to be able to understand and trace the history of files in order to answer the who, what and why of source code changes. Without proper history tools integrated into their SCM system, companies lose the ability to identify important historical truths about their source code and their development process.
AccuRev provides software development organizations with several powerful tools and features for capturing, analyzing and operating on file and stream history. At the lowest level, all operations to files, directories and streams are maintained persistently in AccuRev and this information is available to the user through the AccuRev command line interface. Further, the history of any given file or stream is easily accessible in graphical form via the History view in the AccuRev GUI. By simply clicking on two versions in the History view, users can perform detailed difference operations on any file versions to analyze what changes have occurred. Finally, the detailed history of any file is available in the powerful and easy to use History Annotation view. This view includes a version slider that enables users view historical versions of files, including information on which changes were made, who made the change, and when the change was made. At any time, users can copy a historical version into their workspace for further analysis and operations.
Key features
- History is persistently stored rather than being placed in volatile log files to enable fully audit capabilities
- File history and stream history are available via command line and GUI interfaces
- Historical versions of files can be easily transferred to a user workspace
- The History Annotation view provides a fully annotated view of the entire history of a file
- Difference operations available in the History view and the command line