No, it's more about institutional inertia.
For WAS, once you consider programmers, architects, testers, documentation writers, managers, the build team, project management, L3 support & anyone else who needs access to our change management or source control (because CMVC integrates both) you're talking about a lot of people; probably well over a 1000 for everyone who needs access for one reason or another. Moving to *anything* else would require a tremendous amount of training, effort & expense, not to mention the impact to schedules for a product that *never* gets any downtime.
The support angle is one that is particularly easy to overlook. It's not like WAS is an open-source project that has the luxury of saying "sorry, we don't support old versions; try our latest nightly build to see if it fixes your problem"; our customers with multi-million dollar support contracts would probably take exception to that :-) The question then becomes "Do we migrate old releases to the new system?" If not, then a significant portion of the collective team needs to retain skills for the old systems, and we have to continue to pay to maintain those old systems. If you do migrate old releases to the new system you need to do so in a way that does not interrupt the delivery of critical fixes or even regularly scheduled maintenance to customers.
Platform support is another killer for us; we need clients on all kinds of exotic operating system/processor architecture combinations. Can you get a ClearCase client for Solaris on Opteron or HPUX on Itanium? What about a Subversion client for zOS or i5OS? Most projects don't have to worry about such things, but we do :-)
Throw in the fun we have with satisfying auditors for US FDA & CommonCriteria requirements and you can start to see why we're reluctant to move off of a known system, even if the grass looks greener on the other side. As a student & as a regular developer I never had an appreciation for these kinds of issues but I do now.
| ____________________________________________________________________________________________ | |
| Jeffrey E. (Jeff) Care | |
| IBM WebSphere Application Server Development |
WAS 7.0 Lead
Release Engineer
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| |
| Steve Loughran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10/19/2006 06:43 AM
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Jeffrey E Care wrote:
> Actually, WAS doesn't use ClearCase; we're still on IBM CMVC.
what, you're not scared of it, are you :)
-steve
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