DeLorme and AccuRev Press Release

The press release reporting DeLorme's purchase of AccuRev came out earlier today. It took poor Alex Forbes some time to pin me down for the interview, but he did a great job with the write up. The old SCM system had to remain nameless, but its behaviors have made it clear it isn't all that safe for our sources. One item in the release was particularly interesting:

"...AccuRev increased productivity by eliminating broken builds, and teams that were unable to access the previous SCM repository for 24 hours at a time while a new build was created are now able to work continuously...." (says I)

Since we only did night builds, if a build broke you had to remain careful about what changes you pulled down from the SCM repository. You never knew if the change might force you into pulling down code which had failed to compile and was therefore in an unknown state. Back in the pre-AccuRev era we actually had little certificates of "Build Breakage" or "Build Dalekage" with various levels of severity based on the number of errors. If you broke the nightly build(s) you could be relatively certain of finding one of those certificates on your door in the morning.

With AccuRev, however, we can grab revisions based on a particular transaction number. This allows a developer to look at the Continuity Build, if it is green they can take the reported transaction and run "accurev update -t transactionID" to update their workspace to that known safe point. I look forward to seeing that feature moved from the command line to the GUI in a future version of AccuRev. Now broken builds are more rare and when the do happen are localized and visible within a very short period of time.