Graduating from microsoft visual sourcesafe to ... - PVCS - Synergex

G R A D U ATING FROM MICROSOFT ® VISUAL SOURCESAFE TO MERANT ® S C M
Why Move from a Free Tool?
Many organizations use Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe to protect code and to version
development files. Visual SourceSafe has the advantage of being bundled with Microsoft
development tools, and it is a great way to begin imposing basic versioning, immediately.
H o w e v e r, if development projects grow or become more complex, and or if teams advance
to distributed or parallel development, Visual SourceSafe by itself may not be enough.
Visual SourceSafe is not scalable, robust enough nor full featured to meet these more
complex, enterprise strength needs. When development needs grow, PVCS Professional
provides the next level. And, PVCS products can co-exist with Visual SourceSafe, so
there is no need to choose between one or the other — smaller teams or dedicated
Visual Studio teams can continue to use Visual SourceSafe.
In the short run Visual SourceSafe saves the purchase cost of an SCM toolset, but
long term costs include adding risk and limiting capacity engineering maturity, if Vi s u a l
SourceSafe is expected to fulfill all of the organization’s SCM needs.
The Costs of “Free” SCM
Customers have told Merant that it’s easy to quickly outgrow Visual SourceSafe. Teams
with growing projects and complexity may have problems pulling a build, and are never
exactly certain of what is in the build. They tell us data is lost or corrupted, and that they
have to create new databases when projects grow and then struggle to coordinate across
teams and project databases. They tell us they have created workarounds using Excel and
Word documents to capture sequential coding activity and distributed contributions.
Such workarounds can actually end up costing more — in time, in errors, in lost
productivity and reliance on manual methods that could be handled automatically.
Daily Pain is Another Hidden Cost
Development resources are among the most valuable in any enterprise. Even if you
avoid purchasing a full-featured SCM toolset, you still have the hidden costs resulting
from developers who are not being helped to do their best. Instead of focusing on
quality development, they can lose productivity if they have to juggle spreadsheets and
Word documents and never-ending emails to fix what should have been automated
from the start. You may not have paid out any money, but you have paid in terms of
lost productivity, rework and developer frustration.
Here are some common “pains” when Visual SourceSafe is stretched in complex team
development situations for which it was never intended:
Crunch time. It’s time to turn a build over to testing, and the test will run overnight.
But the SourceSafe archive freezes. With no one there to figure out the problem,
precious time is lost. And more time is wasted as teams are forced to deal with testing
during the next day’s business hours.
Who’s doing what, when? Developers continue to change code, but are unaware of
where it is in the lifecycle. Is it in testing? Production? Release? Which versioned files
go with which build, which release?
M E R A N T
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