1998 User Conference

Presentations

New Features in Perforce 98.2

by Christopher Seiwald, Perforce President and CTO

These slides, along with the Release Notes, provide a summary of new features in Perforce 98.2. Also included are future directions for 98.3 and beyond.

Cadence-Perforce Integration

by Shiv Sikand, Silicon Graphics, Inc.

With the release of Cadence 4.4, it is now possible to integrate a third party DM system to manage libraries and design data. The paper will describe the Cadence 4.4 database architecture and the use of Skill triggers to integrate Perforce as the SCM system. Since requirements will vary from site to site, specific implementation details will not be covered but a pratical guide to building such a system will be presented.

High-level Best Practices in Software Configuration Management

by Laura Wingerd, Senior Member, Perforce Technical Staff

When deploying new SCM (software configuration management) tools, implementers sometimes focus on perfecting fine-grained activities, while unwittingly carrying forward poor, large-scale practices from their previous jobs or previous tools. The result is a well-executed blunder. This paper promotes some high-level best practices that reflect the authors' experiences in deploying SCM.

If printing this paper, use Landscape orientation.

Advanced SCM Branching Strategies

by Stephen Vance , Stellar Advances

In Software Configuration Management (SCM) systems, branching is the mechanism by which development can proceed along more than one path simultaneously while maintaining the relationships between the different paths. As such it is a foundational technique behind any well-organized large-scale development, maintenance and release effort. Frequently, applications of technique that are obvious or that work well in small-scale efforts are inefficient and counter-productive when applied in the larger scale. The same is true of branching in SCM environments. In this paper, I first define branching in a general sense. I then discuss various strategies for branching, starting with the obvious and moving up to several that are more appropriate for larger development efforts. Along the way, I discuss the pros and cons of each strategy, using them to motivate the changes that compose the more complex strategies. Although these strategies are related to actual SCM systems, particularly Perforce, where possible, some implementational details assume a certain level of proficiency with Perforce and remain for the implementor to devise.

These strategies are based on experiences with several SCM systems on development projects ranging from tens of thousands to several million lines of code. These projects were developed by several dozen people concurrently in an internationally distributed environment.

Perforce Real-World Lab

by Presented by Mark Lentczner, Glyphic Technology

The goal of this workshop was to learn techniques and gain a better understanding for applying the Perforce tools and concepts to a variety of situations.

The workshop simulated the real-world: Several different project scenarios were presented. For each, the attendees broke into small groups and designed "how to support the project" with Perforce. After presentation of each group's design, we discussed the various approaches. Then we saw how the designs worked in light of some 'unexpected' project needs.

In this workshop there are no right answers. Each project will, like the real-world, afford different approaches. The aim is that by working through the different designs we can all come away with more ideas and a better understanding of how to use Perforce.