Accurev SCM

Question

Does anyone use Accurev for Source Control Management? We are switching (eventually) from StarTeam to Accurev.

My initial impression is that the GUI tool is severely lacking, however the underlying engine, and the branches as streams concept is incredible.

The biggest difficulty we are facing is assessing our own DIY tools that interfaced with starteam, and either replacing them with DIY new tools, or finding and purchasing appropriate replacements.

Additionally, is anyone using the AccuWork component for Issue management? Starteam had a very nice change request system, and AccuWork does not come close to matching it. We are evaluating either using Accuwork, or buying a 3rd party package such as JIRA.

Opinions?

Answer 1

At a previous employer we reviewed Accurev and Plastic SCM. At the end of the day, I was not impressed with Accurev's interface, or the so-called "streams". We went with Plastic, and nobody complained.

@Jonathan The streams are interesting,but I don't see how any version control can magically avoid collisions when two people touch the same code in the same file. Accurev's model was intriguing, but at the end of the day, nice clean branching and merging with a drop dead easy interface made Plastic the choice for us. Plastic's timeline view (I forget the actual name), showing the branch/merge/check-in history made it very simple to review the history of the project from a bird's eye view.

Answer 2

@Steveth

The Interface is lousy...However the streams model is very innovative.

Being able to create a stream for a new project off the trunk stream, and having 5 developers working on it, and not having any form of merge collisions when we merge that stream back into the main trunk is unheard of, yet it works well in Accurev.

Answer 3

I used AccuRev at a previous job and didn't have any problems with it, but I very much prefer Subversion (even without comparing the price difference). I remember the client GUI being pretty slow too. Also, I do recall that the GUI just called their command-line utilities to interface with the repository. So, it probably won't be that hard to use those interfaces for your DIY tools.

Answer 4

We've been using AccuRev for a few years now. It's a serious improvement over our last tool (Razor) and while I'd recommend it for others- it does have a few drawbacks.

Benefits:

• The stream based interface is quite intuitive. I make snapshots every second week and have a number of ongoing development streams branching off the snapshot.
• Moving changes between stream is really easy, just select the change, send it to the "change palette" and select the destination stream. It guides you through all the files that need to be merged.
• The command-line utilities are great. We've managed to script most of our release generation around it.
• Integrations for Visual Studio, Bugzilla, etc...

Drawbacks:

• As monjardin pointed out, the client GUI can be slow. I use the windows version for all my history/stream searching since it's much faster than the X11 one. Of course, the GUI's written in Java so performance obviously wasn't their first concern.
• It's starting to get slow for really large databases (I'm talking over 300,000 LOC), although they've apparently addressed it in today's release of 4.7.

We opted to go with the cheaper license and not get the change packages feature (I can't see them working that well anyways, as the entire idea of promoting individual changes flies in the face of continuous integration). So far it hasn't hurt us.

Overall, for the price you pay it's a nice tool. We evaluated ClearCase, MKS, Spectrum and Subversion during our trial period. Subversion may have been a good choice, but it was still pretty green when we were evaluating. I've never heard of Plastic before, but I regret not evaluating Perforce.

Also, I understand that the engineers over at Trolltech (makers of Qt) have recently switched to git. I'd be interested in checking that out as well.

Answer 5

Well, all I can say is that I completely agree. The back-end is great but the UI sucks. The stream functionality is great because it makes merging no brainier as all changes from parent streams are automatically propagated to all children. I wrote a post about Accurev UI that explains most of the shortcomings I've come across for last 2 years.

Answer 6

Accurev sucks! It's overcomplicated for the price of productivity of the team. I've worked with several SCMs and the idea of accurev is great but not practical. It's Merge Hell with a hierarchy that looks good in the UI but is pain to deal with when it comes to real life. Specially when you refactor your code (something that some people actually do everyonce in a while) and you get in a mess when a defunct file is not promote all the way up. Or even worse if somebody else overrides a defunct file and creates a new file with the same name....etc

The UI is incredible terrible. Which honestly doesn't matter how good you think the backend is. You will still use the UI (I use the VS plugin which is half decent except it freezes the IDE sometimes, nice huh!).

If you live in the 80's and are planing to use the command line for you day to day use, then i guess you can avoid the UI. If you have an integration build server then of course you have no choice but to use the command line (No native tasks for MSbuild/ANT/NANT that i know of). I just heard that they are doing some work with http://www.electric-cloud.com/. Don't know anything about it still.

Accurev is new therefore there has little resources available online as apposed to svn which you would find tons of integration work that was done by hundreds (with jira for example).

If you are a manager. Accurev will make you feel good looking at the streams, because it does look pretty as long as you dont have to deal with it..

If you are a developer, (a junior developer will not care much, he/she will do whatever you ask them to do)

If you are an architect, refactors a lot, re-addresses architecural descisions...etc you will find accurev as your worste enemy, moving stuff around is pain. Very anti-agile if you ask me. It's not fluid..

If you are a build engineer, you will find it PAIN to get all the developers into a procedure, which you will have to do if you use accurev (ex. promote their code to the agreed upon stream in preperation for a release)....

CRM is supposed to make things easier... I dont see Accurev at this point doing that.. It's still not mature enough, If you want to be a pioneer and strugle in the hope for things to get better..go for it.. Otherwise, don't re-invent the wheel and go with something more established with much more case studies and applications. Because to be practical, what accurev claims to offer that differs is not worth it when you deal with it's pains on a daily basis...

Answer 7

I worked on (and administrated) AccuRev for more than a year lately, and most of my impressions are very good.

We evaluated it alongside with "Plastic SCM", SVN and "ClearCase-UCM" (that we already owned and used), and decided to dump ClearCase and SVN (both were used in two different groups) and to purchase AccuRev.

1. First, the stream architecture is much more solid, easy and safe SCM method than the old branching architecture that all the other tools are tied to (yes even ClearCase's "streams" are eventually a wrapper of branches). There's a lot of articles about the differences in their site, you can search and read about it to make it understandable. (Try this link, and this one too)

2. The timesafe architecture - you can't delete anything from the depots (=repositories) database. I saw tools that this operation is possible with the proper admin permissions. In AccuRev you will use internal commands in order to change or fix a mistake you made, which in turn will be recorded as a new transaction also. Very smart very safe.

3. integrations! AccuRev integrates with so many tools (to give you ALM bundle) - bug tracking tools (like JIRA, ClearQuest), IDEs, testing tools (quality center), and if you can't find one you can write your own (they provide Java/Perl/XML/CLI SDKs)

4. Change Package, I don't know about you, but I can't stand SCM tools that doesn't supply change management (did anyone said SVN?), like ClearCase "activities", and AccuRev's "issues". It's a must for my opinion, and one of my CM "best practice". And they can be integrated with your bug tracking tool too, so your users can work on real tasks like features and defects.

5. the support is just amazing. As a former client of IBM (because of Rational ClearCase is now part of IBM), the shift to AccuRev was simply awesome. During the evaluation they gave numerous on-line support to understand how we want the tool to act for us, so we tweaked it together even before we payed a cent. And they kept that degree of responsiveness after that evaluation period too; We had some problem during an upgrade from 4.5.4 to 4.6, in just a couple of hours (while the upgrade is still in process) the support guy contacted me back, suggested a few tips, connected to my desktop and finally fixed the problem before any other company's support would even started to try to figure who you are. Of course that if you choose open source tool than you're on your own! Also the tool comes with help system, which can be even too verbose sometimes. And don't forget the forums (especially on cmcrossroads) that are very good in supplying rapid answers too.

6. And there's so many more....

Of course there are also drawbacks (which software is perfect?) - I would like, for example, to see the file(s) <-> issue(s) association during check-in too, like in ClearCase, not just in "promotion" like it is today - but IMHO they are really minor.

So, as you can understand, if you read it all, I'm a big fan of AccuRev, and I'm highly recommending it. IMHO, it is today one of the best SCM tools you got the chance to work on; modern, wise, easy and strong.

Answer 8

I've been a long time Accurev user, and have recently moved to a job where I'm using Perforce. I gotta tell you, I wish I had Accurev back. I do agree - the UI is slow and has problems.

However there are some truly AWESOME visualization tools in there. I can't believe that anyone would look at the version history browser and not fall in love! The stream browser is a great simple tool to understand what is going on in your development organization.

Also, dirt simple to administer. Accurev is actually one of my favourite tools.

Answer 9

Honestly, I feel like I need to double check to see if I'm using the same tool as these folks that seem to like Accurev. I used Subversion in my previous job and liked it a lot. We never had any issues with it to speak of, and of course the price is right. My biggest problem with Accurev is that it seems they felt the need to be different for different's sake. It uses a completely different vocabulary to express versioning concepts, that even after using it for almost 6 months, feels very foreign to me. It has no fewer than 8 or 9 states any given file can be in, compared to about around 1/2 as many for Subversion. The GUI is crappy and slow, and the IDE integration plugins are sub-par. I had assumed that at some point I would "get" Accurev and see why it's so much better, but that has yet to happen. My advice is to stay away.

Answer 10

I've just come across this discussion and thought I would share our experiences with AccuRev.

We have been using the Dimensions SCM from Serena for around 8 years. Two years ago we had a major problem integrating our India based Development team with our UK Dev team. It was clear that we were not going to meet our needs with the current system and hence we set about evaluating a number of options. I discuss all of this in this article How We Integrated Our Offshore Dev Team.

Our experience of using AccuRev has so far been very positive.

• It is easy to setup and administer.
• Users are able to get going very very quickly (especially important for the India dev team)
• We've never had a problem with speed (in fact this is one of the main plus points for us)
• The replication works like a dream
• I do agree that the UI can be a bit clunky (especially the Unix client). I am hoping that it will be better in the latest version when we update to that next month.

All in all I would say that this was one of the best decisions and purchases we have made.

Answer 11

One of the best days I've ever had at my current job is they day we ditched Accurev and moved to Subversion. Accurev uses overly complicated concepts. Like one of the commenters above, after working with it for years, I still didn't understand the different states that artifacts could be in. It seems that Accurev's greatest asset is its whitepapers and stream visualization, both of which are v appealing to management but does nothing for developers. I use Subversion, Mercurial and Git for various projects and would recommend these tools over any other.

Answer 12

The sort answer: Use the latest SVN server and SmartSVN (the community edition is free) as a client. You will not pay anything and you can get everything you need.

The gory details: BTW the feature of imposing the change management rules during checking is trivial to write as a SVN hook. We did it in a couple of hours, in one hundred lines (or thereabout) of code - it works wonderfully and never broke. It integrates SVN with Bugzilla and imposes rules such as:

1. In order to commit you have to enter a message
2. In order to commit you must have entered a Bugzilla ID that is in a "Valid" commit state. ... and so on, you can build your own rules to your heart's content

Accurev seems to be marketware to me ... lousy GUI client ... very slow (we had to upgrade the HW to make it actually work effectively), and of course ... you have to pay for it! Ah yes, if you do use it, I hope that you do not have to replicate your server between some place in the US and some place in India :)

Perforce is more robust but it is not very easy to administer. In any case, it is a superior product in comparison to Accurev.

VSS and stuff like that should not even be considered as "version control" systems when it comes to writing professional software (typically, enterprise software) in the 21st century. That's like writing your reports on a typewriter ;-)

If you know what you are doing (with your software) then SVN will be a robust and efficient solution for you. With (at least) two robust and efficient revision control systems in existence today (SVN/GIT) there is very little room to justify working with a proprietary solution; some reasons could be "inertia": you have it, you don't care paying for it, and you didn't have any major issues -- in other words, it works for you.

I use SVN everywhere, when it didn't exist I was using CVS, and before that ... no I am not going to tell you how old I am ;-)

Hope this helped ...

Ciao.

Answer 13

Put me in the anti-Accurev camp. We moved to it recently, and it's been horrible. We have a number of quite large projects, and Accurev seems to be almost unusable for the quantity of files we have. Over a VPN, forget it. It takes forever to update, the cross-stream management doesn't work in any intuitive way, the UI is complex and slow.

Additionally, support for it in a number of tools we use is either non-existent or poorly implemented.

Add the various bugs that keep popping up, and I'd say we wasted a great deal of money for something that is done much better by open-source software, such as Subversion. We still use CVS for some projects, and even it is so much better for normal operations and workflow that I'd pick it over Accurev.

Answer 14

Another big thumbs down for Accurev. Every simple operation seems to become so horribly complex - cryptic error messages send you scattering to manual, only finding theoretical explanations about concepts that shouldn't have existed in the first place.

UI is so slow and unresponsive it makes you want to gouge your eyes out.

Stay away.

Answer 15

Accurev is simply the worst tool I have ever used.

Subversion is very good, esp if you are migrating from cvs.

Answer 16

I've spent TWO hours trying to connect through VPN, can't get pass the login screen, the ability to work remote is very important for me so I would not recommend it if you want to work remote.

Suberversion and Git seem to be a better option BY FAR.

Bad experience so far...

Answer 17

After 4 months, my very negative opinion hasn't changed at all. While Accurev has some very nice concepts, the slowness and complexity far outweigh the advantages, at least for us. Aside from the usual complaints about the GUI and the obscurity of a number of features, one of the absolutely most annoying faults is how many hoops you have to jump through just to update a workspace, made much worse by the inability to update only one directory (or directory tree).

A typical update consists of waiting a loooong time to be told you have overlaps. Of course, you aren't told what the overlaps are. So, you have to do an overlap search, wait another loooong time, resolve the overlaps, do another update, wait a looooong time, and hope it worked this time.

Some of our remote developers update as infrequently as possible because the update time over VPN is absurd. Granted, we have an enormous number of source files across a number of products, and if we reorganized everything we could probably improve performance.

However, we hired Accurev (at a significant cost) to come in and tell us how to set everything up. Still sucks. Aside from that, we really shouldn't have to reorganize the way we work with our sources to suit a source-code-control system. It's a tool, not a business model.

Lastly, we've been trying out an Accurev plugin for IntelliJ, written by Accurev. It works just as poorly as the rest, and, while Accurev has been very responsive about fixing the plugin, we aren't their QA group, nor did we sign up to be an alpha test site (yes, it's that buggy). We finally gave up and wrote our own plugin that actually works.

Answer 18

My current client uses Accurev for SCM and after a few projects using a DVCS like Git or Mercurial, I can honestly say that using Accurev is about as enjoyable as closing your face in a car door.

The GUI for Mac and Linux is god awful slow. You can forget using the refactoring support in your IntelliJ or NetBeans IDE, if you use Accurev...that is unless you are going to write your own plugin.

Oh yea...let's not forget about this little chestnut ==> evil twin.

On a positive note, it could be worse...it could be Clearcase.