News
Telelogic embeds task-based CM in Visual Studio .NET
- By Rich Seeley
- December 9, 2003
Task-based change management (CM) tools can make a 'huge'
difference for developers working in teams on enterprise projects, argues
Jean-Louis Vignaud, vice president at Telelogic, Irvine, Calif.
''For developers, the benefit is that they have much better control of the
content of their workspace,'' he said. Telelogic is now positioned to further
spread Synergy, the company's task-based CM tool, as it is newly available in an
embedded version for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET.
Vignaud said a development team working on a large project that culminates at
the end of each day with ''a nightly build'' is a prime example of change
management territory. Theoretically, the night build would integrate the
developer's work into the enterprise applications, but Vignaud said that is
where the problem of change management often becomes apparent.
He cited a customer example. ''With their current methodology, which is
file-based configuration management, 70% of the time their builds are broken,''
he said. ''This means that they are not able to integrate the work done by the
developer during the day. They are not able to integrate work, so developers
cannot share and integrate the work with other developers because the nightly
build did not work.''
He argues that task-based CM, which is the Telelogic approach, can improve
that situation.
''The value of a task-based CM [occurs] when developers have finished the work
-- they just say, 'I've finished my task,''' noted Vignaud. ''[Synergy] then
automatically checks all the files that have been changed. That makes the
checking much more robust, as developers don't forget to check in a file. In the
case of builds that fail 70% of the time, the vast majority of broken builds are
[due to the fact that] someone forgot to check in something. That's the value of
Synergy -- making the build process, the team engineering process, much more
efficient.''
The new interface for Microsoft .NET developers is called the Synergy/CM Task
Toolbar and includes dialog boxes designed to place task-based CM within the
.NET Framework, said Vignaud.
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About the Author
Rich Seeley is Web Editor for Campus Technology.