Accurev SCM [closed]

Answer 1

At a previous employer we reviewed Accurev and Plastic SCM. At the end of the day, I was not impressed with Accurev's interface, or the so-called "streams". We went with Plastic, and nobody complained.

@Jonathan The streams are interesting,but I don't see how any version control can magically avoid collisions when two people touch the same code in the same file. Accurev's model was intriguing, but at the end of the day, nice clean branching and merging with a drop dead easy interface made Plastic the choice for us. Plastic's timeline view (I forget the actual name), showing the branch/merge/check-in history made it very simple to review the history of the project from a bird's eye view.

Answer 2

I have used AccuRev for nine months and I anxiously await the day I use it no more. My one line review is:

It's like source control written by developers who have read about it in a book, but have never actually used it before.

1. Basic concepts are missing or extremely complicated. Example, I've just lost 8 hours work because there's no good way to "revert" a change once it's in a stream. You can "purge" that transaction - but thats it its gone, you can't then cherry pick the changes you really wanted.

2. The GUI is slow, bloated and inconsistent. Warnings are cryptic eg "error merging element id 1234556". Every single dialog box is modal. As one poster said, there are 9 states a file can be in - but what's more, you must manually click through a list box of 9 options to see the setting for each file.

3. The streams model sounds like a good idea, but the default behavior of "inheriting" changes from a parent stream is actually incredibly bad in practice. Just say the word "Deep Overlap" to anyone who has really used AccuRev and watch them shudder, turn pale, and/or faint. Making the streams is very easy, but actually merging them with any meaningful differences is arcane and non-deterministic.

4. No one has mentioned this, but the whole system of "include/exclude" rules to manage file and directory filters is completely broken. This system lives outside the transaction system so there's no way to revert, track history or reproduce changes to a live source stream - for example when Johnny Intern decides the "core" library isn't useful to the entire development team.

The only reason I can account for Accurev's popularity is that it is optimized for the "Demo to Management" case. We're using AccuRev for serious software development - dozens of projects and many more developers. The streams and the GUI look great but after a few weeks use varnish comes off revealing a old, busted, mechanical-turk like system.

Stay far away from Accurev - use Git or Mercurial if you want something modern and free, or Perforce if you want something rock solid, well-supported but expensive.

EDIT: As a postscript here's one of the many examples of the lack of care and general shoddiness in the UI:

The default difference viewer has its numbering "off by one" - for example if you have 2 diffs in a file - the viewer shows diff "0 of 1" and diff "1 of 1". I mean, really, would you feel comfortable trusting your code to a system that exhibits such a stupid and easily fixable bug.

Answer 3

I worked on (and administrated) AccuRev for more than a year lately, and most of my impressions are very good.

We evaluated it alongside with "Plastic SCM", SVN and "ClearCase-UCM" (that we already owned and used), and decided to dump ClearCase and SVN (both were used in two different groups) and to purchase AccuRev.

1. First, the stream architecture is much more solid, easy and safe SCM method than the old branching architecture that all the other tools are tied to (yes even ClearCase's "streams" are eventually a wrapper of branches). There's a lot of articles about the differences in their site, you can search and read about it to make it understandable. (Try this link, and this one too)

2. The timesafe architecture - you can't delete anything from the depots (=repositories) database. I saw tools that this operation is possible with the proper admin permissions. In AccuRev you will use internal commands in order to change or fix a mistake you made, which in turn will be recorded as a new transaction also. Very smart very safe.

3. integrations! AccuRev integrates with so many tools (to give you ALM bundle) - bug tracking tools (like JIRA, ClearQuest), IDEs, testing tools (quality center), and if you can't find one you can write your own (they provide Java/Perl/XML/CLI SDKs)

4. Change Package, I don't know about you, but I can't stand SCM tools that doesn't supply change management (did anyone said SVN?), like ClearCase "activities", and AccuRev's "issues". It's a must for my opinion, and one of my CM "best practice". And they can be integrated with your bug tracking tool too, so your users can work on real tasks like features and defects.

5. the support is just amazing. As a former client of IBM (because of Rational ClearCase is now part of IBM), the shift to AccuRev was simply awesome. During the evaluation they gave numerous on-line support to understand how we want the tool to act for us, so we tweaked it together even before we payed a cent. And they kept that degree of responsiveness after that evaluation period too; We had some problem during an upgrade from 4.5.4 to 4.6, in just a couple of hours (while the upgrade is still in process) the support guy contacted me back, suggested a few tips, connected to my desktop and finally fixed the problem before any other company's support would even started to try to figure who you are. Of course that if you choose open source tool than you're on your own! Also the tool comes with help system, which can be even too verbose sometimes. And don't forget the forums (especially on cmcrossroads) that are very good in supplying rapid answers too.

6. And there's so many more....

Of course there are also drawbacks (which software is perfect?) - I would like, for example, to see the file(s) <-> issue(s) association during check-in too, like in ClearCase, not just in "promotion" like it is today - but IMHO they are really minor.

So, as you can understand, if you read it all, I'm a big fan of AccuRev, and I'm highly recommending it. IMHO, it is today one of the best SCM tools you got the chance to work on; modern, wise, easy and strong.

Answer 4

The sort answer: Use the latest SVN server and SmartSVN (the community edition is free) as a client. You will not pay anything and you can get everything you need.

The gory details: BTW the feature of imposing the change management rules during checking is trivial to write as a SVN hook. We did it in a couple of hours, in one hundred lines (or thereabout) of code - it works wonderfully and never broke. It integrates SVN with Bugzilla and imposes rules such as:

1. In order to commit you have to enter a message
2. In order to commit you must have entered a Bugzilla ID that is in a "Valid" commit state. ... and so on, you can build your own rules to your heart's content

Accurev seems to be marketware to me ... lousy GUI client ... very slow (we had to upgrade the HW to make it actually work effectively), and of course ... you have to pay for it! Ah yes, if you do use it, I hope that you do not have to replicate your server between some place in the US and some place in India :)

Perforce is more robust but it is not very easy to administer. In any case, it is a superior product in comparison to Accurev.

VSS and stuff like that should not even be considered as "version control" systems when it comes to writing professional software (typically, enterprise software) in the 21st century. That's like writing your reports on a typewriter ;-)

If you know what you are doing (with your software) then SVN will be a robust and efficient solution for you. With (at least) two robust and efficient revision control systems in existence today (SVN/GIT) there is very little room to justify working with a proprietary solution; some reasons could be "inertia": you have it, you don't care paying for it, and you didn't have any major issues -- in other words, it works for you.

I use SVN everywhere, when it didn't exist I was using CVS, and before that ... no I am not going to tell you how old I am ;-)

Hope this helped ...

Ciao.

Answer 5

We've been using AccuRev for a few years now. It's a serious improvement over our last tool (Razor) and while I'd recommend it for others- it does have a few drawbacks.

Benefits:

• The stream based interface is quite intuitive. I make snapshots every second week and have a number of ongoing development streams branching off the snapshot.
• Moving changes between stream is really easy, just select the change, send it to the "change palette" and select the destination stream. It guides you through all the files that need to be merged.
• The command-line utilities are great. We've managed to script most of our release generation around it.
• Integrations for Visual Studio, Bugzilla, etc...

Drawbacks:

• As monjardin pointed out, the client GUI can be slow. I use the windows version for all my history/stream searching since it's much faster than the X11 one. Of course, the GUI's written in Java so performance obviously wasn't their first concern.
• It's starting to get slow for really large databases (I'm talking over 300,000 LOC), although they've apparently addressed it in today's release of 4.7.

We opted to go with the cheaper license and not get the change packages feature (I can't see them working that well anyways, as the entire idea of promoting individual changes flies in the face of continuous integration). So far it hasn't hurt us.

Overall, for the price you pay it's a nice tool. We evaluated ClearCase, MKS, Spectrum and Subversion during our trial period. Subversion may have been a good choice, but it was still pretty green when we were evaluating. I've never heard of Plastic before, but I regret not evaluating Perforce.

Also, I understand that the engineers over at Trolltech (makers of Qt) have recently switched to git. I'd be interested in checking that out as well.

Answer 6

Accurev is anti-agile tool:

1. Main idea of Accurev is to use different streams for different teams, so, changes made by team1 won't affect team2.
   
   Sounds good, but in a real world we all know that at the end we have to merge the code from both teams and believe me it's nightmare in Accurev. The more changes both teams will do in their streams, the more time everybody will spend on merging at the end.
   
   It's the same if every team will do their development in the separate branch using SVN and trying to merge everything after 1 month of development....Basically Accurev creates late merge price and you are going to pay this price for ever if you will choose Accurev for more than 1 team.

2. In order to fix problem created by point 1 people decide to refuse from cross functional teams in favor of functional. They even provide argument to support this idea, like "knowledge expertise" principle.
   
   In other words when you don't have cross functional teams (and Agile as well) it's easier to have experts for particular part of the system, so they will perform code reviews better and act as "information/design/implementation experts".
   
   We all know that information expert is an anti-pattern not only in Agile, since it's better to spread the expertise in order to avoid knowledge bottlenecks in development.