I’m not sure why the above is a philosophy that occurs more and more frequently, one reason is that people properly don’t realize that they do exactly that.

I work at a place where we pride our self in being Agile, good at Processes, Optimizations, Tracking, Controlling and Reaction and all so fine words. Yes we are indeed a Agile CMMI5 certified company.

This is why I now wonder why after making a mistake as big as choosing ClearCase/ClearQuest house wide, and then admitting that CC/CQ might not exactly be the thing for small projects (my claim is that it is useless for any project that is aiming to earn money), then they are very close to doing the same mistake ones more.

Lets evaluate a bit, the mistake at first was not choosing CC/CQ, no it was the actual process around it, put simply the only real question was to it “Can we use this tool for all projects”, well the answer is obviously “Yes”, no one ever bothered to ask any of the following:

  • Will it be preferred?
  • Will it save money?
  • Will it increase productivity?
  • Will it be worth it?

And so on, funny enough the short answer to all have seemed to be “NO”. And definitely not now where the market is under high pressure.

Our Lessons, Our Reaction

So in a company where we are suppose to be so good at learning by our mistakes. What are we doing differently this time?.

Again, we are not doing as we should, and we are not even doing as the processes tell us to, when ever a project needs to make a decision of that magnitude, it boils down to 3 simple steps:

  1. Start by giving a list of requirements.
  2. Weight each of the requirement.
  3. Identify a list of tools to evaluate against those requirements and scoring them.
  4. Pilot some or all of those that “hits”.

That sounds fairly healthy to me, structured decision making.

In this case of selecting a House wide tool to replace CC/CQ we instead do:

  1. Start by giving a list of requirements. (We have learned something here)
  2. Select your favorite tool and evaluate it against the requirements.
  3. If it match you have a winner.

Ok, that sounds ok right? but WHAT if there was a better solution out there?

At the end of the day, if we where to cover just 95% of that lists requirements, we could choose CC/CQ all over.

We know by now that CC/CQ does NOT work, apparently people up high here doesn’t feel that it would hurt wasting the same amount of money all over again.

So my question to my self these days is, what are we doing so much better than others?

Another stab at CC/CQ

In the list of bad things about CC/CQ.

I have NEVER EVER seen a SCM that when you say “Add”, “Delete”, “Rename” ect. that then just commits that change immediately, in my world things is always “Add”+”Commit”, but ClearCase does not feel the need for the “Commit” part, surely it is perfectly safe to just throw it directly in the repository right away.

It is the WORST thing I have ever seen from a SCM, and ill admit that I have never worked with Visual Source Safe, so there is still room for worse tools.