High-End Watershed: Multisite Support

As software companies struggle to pump up their productivity on large-scale projects, it's becoming common for them to divide the responsibility for software development among several teams located at different sites. These teams might be in adjoining rooms, in different places across town, in neighboring states, or scattered over the globe.

Even if an infrastructure exists to support these teams, it's not necessarily available to contract programmers working from their own offices or offshore development shops. In some cases, a programmer might nee d to access source code while performing on-site support or customized development at a client's facility.

In each of these situations, version-control and configuration management (VC/CM) tools built around a single-server paradigm fail to deliver the needed capability. Changes made at remote sites must be merged into the sources at the main site. But performing this process manually is time-consuming and can be prone to error, especially if users at several sites are making changes to the same sources. Also, different sites might be in control of various software components, which makes it difficult to locate the master copy of a particular code component.

To be effective, a multisite VC/CM system should support the management of a distributed development environment. It must maintain parallel repositories at multiple sites without manual intervention. These sites should be synchronized automatically as determined by the project coordinator, either periodically or in response to such events as the release of code.

Of course, support should exist for dist ributing updates via an enterprise-wide network. But the use of other channels, including direct-dial, Internet transfer, and using such media as tape, should be supported as well. Brute-force methods of synchronization are wasteful. An efficient system minimizes the volume of data transfer by exchanging only changed files or even just the changes within files. And, finally, the system must be available on all platforms on which the development is taking place.

According to Van Simmons, product manager for VNP Software's DevMan, "Distributed development tools, combined with the widespread availability of affordable Internet connections, can produce very important gains in this regard. Scattered sites all over the world can work together as a team on one project."

Multisite VC/CM support will likely become a high priority for many VC/CM-solution providers. Before the widespread adoption of multisite support occurs, however, customers must demand that security issues and cross-platform limitations b e addressed.