Codice has announced Plastic SCM, a cross-platform software configuration management tool for managing parallel development scenarios, where multiple developers work on building software even from geographically dispersed locations. Plastic SCM provides software configuration and version control functionality, in addition to merge tracking, true renaming, and visualization.
Among Plastic SCM features are:
- Ways to implement two key software development productivity concepts: task oriented and parallel software development. The Plastic branching system allows new parallel development lines to be created with just a click, and both the 3D version tree and new branch explorer ease visualization and comprehension of the development process.
- Management of thousands of branches through a streamlined UI. Plastic SCM developers face no restriction in terms of the number of branches they can manage.
- Salability in terms of back-end databases. Plastic comes installed using the open source Firebird database. For larger development teams (more than a dozen developers), Plastic SCM can be integrated with the SQL Server or MySQL databases.
Plastic can be used by Java, Microsoft, and any other language- based developers, and it works with tools such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, and Oracle JDeveloper. As a replacement for CVS, Visual SourceSafe or Subversion, Plastic SCM includes functionality to import branches and related data from these tools.
Plastic wraps a revision management engine around its versioning functionality. It lets managers assign tasks and attach them to a branch of a given project. At the end of the project, managers can review what revisions were made. Plastic SCM can also create visual reports related to the revision information.
"The two biggest challenges for SCM systems are enabling highly parallel distributed development, and making the state of projects visible to both developers and management," said Joe Niski, senior analyst at Burton Group. "Many products support distributed teams, but only a few provide useful visualizations of a project's code base. By taking a task-centric approach to version control, products like Plastic SCM facilitate fast-paced development lifecycles; by including graphical views of changes, they provide value to managers as well as developers."
