Lee has started to talk about merging in his last blog, as he showed how to apply a hotfix to the current development version. I’ll take on his topic to talk about one of PureCM’s most powerful features: automated merging with ‘Merge Rules’. Where does merging happen? PureCM is a client/server based solution, so the all project data is stored in a safe repository. As a developer, you work in a so called ‘workspace’, a local copy of any project held in the repository. This solutions has the benefit of supporting both concurrent and offline development. The... [More]

We’ve now covered the development journey from setting up a project hierarchy and assigning features and tasks to completing work. It’s time to have a look at how you can keep track of what’s happened. PureCM offers several ways to visualise project status, which I’ll present below. What information do you need? True, there are countless reports, diagrams and options when looking at reporting. But if I try to reduce to the max, as a development or project manager you’ll quite likely want to get answers to the following questions: What has been completed ... [More]

  So far, we’ve covered the new planning functionality of PureCM Professional. You’ve seen how to define project and versions and how to schedule and assign work items using features and tasks.   Is this series going to be all about release planning? So all about project management and nothing on software configuration management (SCM), the traditional core of PureCM. Clearly not! PureCM 2010 fully integrates release planning and configuration management, offering important benefits to the user: In smaller companies, planning and configuration management is of... [More]

The last PureCM 2010-1 release has added some very powerful features to PureCM. But how do they relate to day-to-day development? And how to get started? These questions are at the core of our new ‘Solving Development Challenges’ (SDC) blog series that kicks off with this one. So watch out for our SDC blogs to learn about how you can facilitate your software development with PureCM!  One challenge, one blog The next blog in a few days time will look at project planning from a project manager’s perspective. Then we’ll take the development manager’s view on c... [More]

Looking into 2010 from a PureCM point of view Exciting times are ahead with the PureCM 2010-1 beta now available for download and the full release coming closer. As this release will mark a very substantial step forward regarding PureCM's feature set, it looks like this is a great moment to share our product roadmap with you. Please feel free to comment; regardless of whether you want to praise or criticise!  Feature Target release   Release planning, task tracking Agile release planning for multiple projects using releases and iterations Support... [More]

We have just released the latest plugin for PureCM, which links changesets to issues in the Gemini issue tracking tool. Why Gemini? We've had various customers asking how they could best use PureCM with a web front end for their helpdesk team. As we've been focusing on developing a tight release planning/configuration management integration with the upcoming 2010-1 release, reaching to teams outside core development is currently better supported with 3rd party solutions such as Gemini. This tool is particularly well suited to integrate with PureCM given its simple yet flexible user interface.&... [More]

Well, this time the title might be slightly misleading. It should rather say something like ‘The PureCM GUI Views: Part 2 – kind of...’, as I’ll not talk about the PureCM GUI client itself, but about the GUI most developers face on a daily, well most probably even on a constant, basis: their IDE. Whether it’s Visual Studio, Eclipse or any other solution, flicking between tools isn’t just a hassle, it might even lead to (manual) workarounds that potentially affect product quality. With today’s multi-screen infrastructure and powerful integrations, arra... [More]

We often get in contact with people evaluating an SCM tool for the first time. Most of the time, they work in a small team that has grown. So all of a sudden, the “have you finished working on file A?” or “which folder was the latest version in again?” questions don’t work the way they did before. Things get chaotic and errors start to creep in. Valuable time gets lost. So they start looking around for a tool to help them address these issues. However, implementing SCM is just as much about how to define and set up the processes, as well as addressing resistance ... [More]