One of the great strengths of PureCM has always been it's support for parallel development. PureCM's merge functionality allows you to keep track of your changesets and which streams they have been submitted against while making it easy for you to merge these changes into other streams as desired. Now we are looking at making merging even more powerful and simple, but let's first take a look at how merging works today.

Merging Today

The original merge process required you to own a workspace for the stream you are merging into. This gives you a number of benefits such as the ability to easily test each change before submitting it to the server. This is shown as (B) in the lower half of the picture below.

However this process can be time consuming and is hard for manager who may not always have a workspace for each stream. This led to a solution that allows users to quickly merge changes between similar streams, which we called “quick merge”. This allows you to merge changes directly on the server removing the need for a workspace in these situations (A in the picture above).

So far, quick merge will only merge changes where there is no possibility of a conflict. This works well for merging last minute fixes into a release stream or early on in the development cycle when not much has changed in the new development stream but we felt there was a need to improve on this restriction.

Moving Forward

The next stage in this evolution is to allow you to resolve conflicts as part of quick merge without the need for a workspace. This will simply launch the familiar PureCM resolve tool when quick merge finds a conflict.

Combining this new functionality with automated test and build processes (such as PureCM's Cruise Control plug-in) provides a fast and simple way to keep your streams up to date while giving you the security that any errors are picked up immediately so you can assign someone to look at it.

This new advancement to quick merge opens up a realm of possible future features for the tool to help speed up your development process through merging. One example of this is the creation of automatic merge paths to control the flow of your changes through your development streams. Plenty of reasons to look forward to the 2009-1 release – and keep your eyes open for future blogs for information about where we go from here!