Jeffrey E Care wrote:
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.
Well, CC is the only SCN system that I know of where an outage means 'no
work, go home early'. Other tools may stop you checking in, and slowly
your local copy goes out of sync, but when CC starts playing up, well,
you have an immediate crisis on your hands.
Its also very high cost in terms of licenses, support people &c. Now,
you dont have to worry so much about licenses, but you will still need
the FTEs to nurture the repository, to keep it fed with live animals or
whatever.
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 :-)
CC is derived from Apollo, which HP bought, and is the tool that HPUX is
built on. If ever they make a change to the FS that is incompatible with
CC, there was some problems until CC was working again.
I do recall that it didnt work on WinXP when that first came out.
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.
Makes sense.
-steve
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