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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