Beyond version control - software configuration management products - Buyers Guide

London-based British Telecommunications Plc. (BT) operates one of the largest global telephone networks in the world. An $18 billion company with 135,000 employees, BT's infrastructure includes 3.6 million telephone poles, 4.5 million covered manholes, 87,000 roadside cabinets, 132,000 pay phones and more than 200 radio transmission stations. Its global network enables customers to dial direct to more than 200 countries, reaching 99% of the world's 700 million telephones. At the network's center are more than 7,500 local exchanges, 59 main switching exchanges in the U.K., four special switching units for London proper, and seven additional switches dedicated to international calls.

Yet despite its size and financial resources, British Telecom is engaged in a battle for its corporate life. Thanks to global deregulation, the telecom giant is faced with falling margins in its core business of providing local and long-distance phone service. Meanwhile, it must compete with a bevy of smaller firms who are going after higher-margin offerings such as Internet access and videoconfercncing. How to keep up? BT is making herculean efforts to offer customers new products and services faster than the competition. To do so, the company is redoubling its commitment to the often unappreciated practice of software configuration management.

Employed correctly, software configuration management (SCM) brings some control to complex client/ server development environments. SCM provides developers with version control, workspace management, build management and process control, as well as small-scale overviews on projects. In addition, it allows project managers who develop such overviews and status reports to relay information to developers, keeping both sides informed of changes.

British Telecom's Configuration Management Unit in Ipswich manages programs that produce software components that run on a mix of mainframes, Unix boxes and PCs. Rapid application development across such a wide range of hardware and software platforms has become a major headache for large IS shops throughout industry sectors.

The proliferation of platforms inside BT and the difficulty of managing code generation across so many environments convinced the IS department that it needed an enterprise-wide configuration management solution that went beyond the different point tools used by its development teams. According to Brian Lloyd, technical support manager for the Configuration Management Unit, developer teams have configuration management under control within respective projects, but management problems arise when projects are brought together. "The difficulty is that all these projects use different tools and processes, and the people running the program just want to see one view," he says. "We provide one common central system and it's our job to interface to what the other projects are doing."

Because each of the different platforms has its own software configuration management tools, BT needed a way to pull them all together into a single process. According to Lloyd, the developers use software components as building blocks to facilitate the development of new services for customers. These services involve telephony facilities such as reminder calls, billing systems and charge card services. "We needed an enterprise-level configuration management service that would help integrate these different products into our existing systems," he says. "When someone comes up with a new facility to offer our customers we just recombine the existing systems rather than start from scratch."

British Telecom, Lloyd says, has set up internal interfaces between its various configuration management systems. Using these, he says, "we can transfer configuration information from the lower-level tools up to the process configuration management software [PCMS Dimensions from SQL Software Inc., Vienna, Va.], which manages the life-cycle across the entire enterprise. PCMS Dimensions lets us manage and build different components, as well as track changes to the software within our process workflow."

Process management software like PCMS Dimensions can significantly improve the way objects like documents, problem reports and software components can be moved through an enterprise. With user-defined processes handling software builds and releases, testing phases and distribution, developers can concentrate more on what they do best: software development.

Source code management used to be easier. Twenty years ago, point tools that controlled access to source code were enough to keep most mainframe shops out of trouble. Tools like Panvalet and Librarian -- now offered by Computer Associates (CA) International Inc., Islandia, N.Y. -- provided most of what companies needed.

But with today's multiplatform development projects measured in days rather than months, customers need a lot more than simple version control from their configuration tools.

This has resulted in a change of attitude in development shops, says John Cimral, vice president and general manager for PVCS at Intersolv Inc., Rockville, Md. "Two or three years ago, we had to evangelize our client/server customers to get them to use basic version control. Now our users are asking for sophisticated functionality in their SCM solutions," he says.

According to Cimral, customers want version control and build tools that can be integrated with other products, including requirements management, change management, impact analysis, automated test tools, release management, software distribution and installation, help desk support and even project management.

For customers like Marcam Corp., the Newton, Mass.-based developer of the Protean manufacturing system, this strategy of combining configuration management tools with other disciplines makes sense. In particular, Marcam expects the recent announcement by Pure Software Corp., Sunnyvale, Calif., of its intent to merge with Atria Software Inc., Lexington, Mass., to have a positive effect on the industry. Marcam uses both Atria's ClearCase and Pure's Distributed Defect-Tracking System (DDTS). Currently, Protean developers use ClearCase to control projects, manage software releases and provide basic version control, while PureDDTS "handles our defect fixing and enhancement processes," says Chuck Farinelli, Marcam's SCM architect. "A planned integration of Pure and Atria products will create a seamless solution between applying defects to change sets and version code and being able to identify those defects in the Defect-Tracking System and in Atria's ClearCase," he says.

As moves like the Pure/Atria merger suggest, SCM is becoming the funnel through which all life-cycle activities pass, says Terry Donovan, a spokeswoman for Computer Associates. For its part, CA is working on CA-Unicenter Advanced Software Configuration Option "provide an upper-level, cross-platform view of the enterprise's software components," she says.

CA Center Advanced Software Configuration Option will serve as a centralized integrated command station providing cross-platform communication and repository services. It will also be able to talk to multiplatform configuration management tools already put in place by the customer. "If someone has already made an investment in one tool, then they don't have to throw it out," says Donovan. "We're not going to enforce any particular tool on any particular platform."

Beyond the need to span multiple platforms, SCM tools must be able to accommodate multiple development teams working on the same software. Without proper coordination and safeguards, team development can quickly become chaotic. This situation is further exacerbated when the developers are working at different physical sites.

Case Corp., an 154-year-old manufacturer of heavy equipment for the agricultural and construction industries, is faced with trying to coordinate geographically dispersed development teams. The Racine, Wisc.-based company has teams in both Europe and in North America working on an enterprise-wide accounting system. The firm selected MKS Source Integrity from Mortice Kern Systems (MKS) Inc., Waterloo, Ontario, because it accommodates Case's geographical concerns.

According to Richard Hugier, a project manager at Case Corp., MKS provides version control, change management and a way to manage "states of promotion." MKS "helps us move our objects from development to the test stage and on to production," he explains. "We can group together all the components of the system, like the code, the build files and the documentation, and promote them as a whole to the next stage of our life-cycle."

When it needed to bring order to its data warehouse tools development project, Columbia Gas of Ohio, Columbus, chose IBM's TeamConnection.

"We needed a system-wide approach that would accommodate our multiple development platforms -- a mix of Unix boxes and mainframes," says Mark Zulovitz, director of information services. "We chose IBM's TeamConnection because it handles multiple teams and provides version control and build capability." TeamConnection, he adds, also supports warehouse technology by permitting the data to be defined in the warehouse as well as in the data dictionary.

Despite its potential for gluing the phases of the life-cycle together, SCM has not received unqualified endorsement by everyone. "Many clients worry that the overhead of using these tools will adversely impact their schedules and budgets. Many are uncomfortable with high learning curves," says Wing Wong, technical director at Coopers & Lybrand Consulting, Edison, N.J.

This hesitation often disappears when the development teams move deeper into the complexities of client/server development. "The first time a development project starts up, the customer may try to get by without setting up an infrastructure," says Scott Richardson, Atria's director of product marketing. "However, when the second project begins, the developers will demand the strong foundation provided by SCM tools."

Mary Hanna is a freelance writer based in Cary, N.C. Additional reporting by Daniela Cimino.

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