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 often looked after by the same person. In this case, using PureCM 2010 results in much simpler administration and less overhead
• If planning and CM is done by different persons, PureCM 2010 allows for an easier collaboration and real-time project status updates for both sides
• Developers only need one tool to manage their work items and complete them, which again reduces overhead

How does planning relate to configuration management?

First, a quick refresher about glossary. PureCM uses the concept of stream-based branching. This allows changes being automatically inherited between streams, making streams something like next generation branches. However, to facilitate our discussion, I’ll simply use the word ‘branch’ in this blog.

To understand the link between planning and CM, let me put the two sides next to each other. When planning your releases by creating versions and scheduling tasks using the Projects view, PureCM automatically prepares a branch for every new version. This is visualised in the diagram below; on the left is what you create using the Projects view, and on the right is what PureCM does for you in the background.

The word ‘prepare’ is important here, as the branch only gets created when the first user starts work on it, i.e. the first workspace is based on this version. So when the first task is worked on, the branch is created from the head revision at that point in time. The advantage here is that you can already start scheduling for the next version without separate branches, so no merging is needed until work has started on both versions. Once work has started, you’re automatically able to work in parallel.

What’s important is that PureCM automatically tracks and notifies the version owner(s) about changes present in one version but not a related one. Which notifications owners receive can be customised by adding or modifying merge rules between versions. You can imagine that notifying owners about pending merges and tracking them after completion reduces human error and facilitates parallel development enormously. I’ll not go into details here, as merge rules will be covered separately.

Of course, you can customise branch creation as long as work hasn’t started on a version. Say you want to link a new version to the same branch as a previous version. This is useful if you only want to separate versions for scheduling, but submit changes against the same branch, the latter becoming your development mainline. This would look as follows:

So a project and configuration manger can sit together when planning a release and collaboratively decide on the best approach. Note that you can also hide versions from the projects view once they don’t need to be supported anymore. This keeps the Projects view tidy and makes it easy to navigate when scheduling and tracking progress.

...and how do features work?

When scheduling a feature in PureCM, the tool also prepares a branch, just as with versions. However, features are typically used in a different way than versions: versions tend to be longer lived, and you only merge selected changes between versions. On the other hand, features tend to be short-lived and will get fully integrated back into their parent version. This is shown on the next image (release snapshots are omitted for simplicity).

By listing incomplete features as children of the version they’re scheduled against, managers get an instant feedback about work in progress, while developers can easily define tasks for a feature to split up their work. Any feature in progress won’t be included when building the version. To get an overview of all completed features, tasks and release snapshots of a specific version, right-click on the version and select ‘Show Submitted Tasks and Releases’.

The big advantage working with PureCM features comes from the fact that it uses stream-based branching. Therefore, a feature automatically inherits all changes that are submitted against its parent version. This is explained in one of Stephen's earlier blogs. You can turn this off again by changing the merge rules, but we've never seen anybody doing this after realising the benefits... Note that working with features also allows for powerful code reviews before integrating the feature. 

We'll revisit features from a developer perspective in a later blog of this SDC series to discuss how they can best work with features.

Summary

This blog has focused on the benefits you get by working with an integrated release planning and CM solution. Parallel maintenance and development can be automated and thus managed with little overhead.

Let’s revisit the main issues I covered in this blog:

• Project and development managers can collaborate in the ‘Projects’ view when planning their releases and customising their configuration management
• Versions prepare a branch as a default and support automated notifications about pending merges
• Features prepare a branch as a default and are automatically kept up to date for easy integration once completed
• Configuration managers can customise and combine the use of versions and features, e.g. using multiple versions to assure maintenance on more than one release

So far, this blog series has focused on the manager’s perspective when setting up the basics of the development lifecycle. Starting with the next blog, we’ll change hats and discuss how developers can benefit when working with tasks and features.