1999 User Conference

Presentations

Product Quality through Change Management

by Richard Brooksby, Geodesic Systems

Software development is all about increasing the value of our products to customers. This paper presents a method of planning, tracking, and managing change to a product, and of directing change at increasing that value. It describes evolutionary planning and delivery using a Perforce-based information system. The paper is based on the author's experience of introducting Capability Maturity Model level 2 and 3 key process areas in small (less than 20 engineers) software organizations.

Geodesic Systems is the leading supplier of enterprise memory and resource management solutions, tools, and services.

An NT User Interface

by Yariv Sheizaf, Software Infrastructure Department Manager Cimatron, Ltd.

NSCM is an NT Shell Software application that works with Perforce. This presentation will cover the features of NSCM. In addition to the standard P4Win features, NSCM offers Reporting, Complex Comparisons, Labels, Changelists, and Branching.

SCM for Hardware Design

by Shiv Sikand, Advanced Graphics Division, SGI

Silicon chip designers have traditionally used TCM ( tar, copy, move) systems to manage their design data since it was not possible to use a SCM tool, let alone a common one, for both software and hardware aspects of the design.

By using Perforce's InterFile BranchingTM mechanism to implement design snapshots and integrating the Cadence DFII tools, SGI has developed a system that allows full-featured SCM for all parts of the chip design flow.

The paper will describe the branching models used and how both logical and physical data produced by many different tools can be integrated seamlessly into a pure change-number driven SCM environment.

It will also demonstrate the scalability and performance of large (>10GB) Perforce databases running on SGI Origin 2000 servers.

Change Management: Containing the Web Crisis

by Susan Dart, Dart Technology Strategies

The web is one of the most powerful technologies for enabling business to be done at the speed of thought. It is changing the way that people do business, communicate and live. In order to survive beyond the first decade of the new millenium, companies must transform themselves into e-business: where all communications, transactions and work are done via the web. But, behind the often garish or entertaining facade of a web site, lies the challenge of managing its infrastructure and its content. It is the latter that is generating The Web Crisis - the proliferation of "hacked together" web-based systems kept running via a continual stream of patches developed without any rigorous or systematic approach.

The software community has experienced a similar crisis and knows that software configuration management (software CM) is a key player in resolving it. For web systems, it will be change content management (CCM) that companies will turn to for diminishing the Web Crisis. Is CCM really software CM applied to web technology tools? Yes, and it is even more. There are exceptional challenges presented by web systems compared to traditional software systems. These challenges include issues regarding the dynamic nature of the content, variant explosion problem, the free-form style of web development, the performance effect of content, scaleability, the urgency and frequency of change, the outsourcing of content, the immaturity of tools, techniques, standards and skills and corporate politics.

As the entire world becomes "webified", the CCM problems will be magnified and the Web Crisis will escalate. Web engineering techniques will evolve to support the dynamic nature of web systems. For instance, while software CM provides a static solution (such as via a centralized development methodology creating batched, planned releases), CCM will have to provide a dynamic solution (via distributed, real-time releases) in response to user traffic monitoring. In order to find a good CCM solution, it is imperative that the lessons learned from software CM be applied to web technology tools. Otherwise, the Web community is doomed to experience all the delivery, quality and complexity problems that have plagued the software community. And, the consequences of those - legal, financial, emotional - will be more devastating because of the real-time, global nature of the Web.

Web Content Management Using Perforce

by Laura Wingerd, Perforce Software

Perforce is recognized as the fast, low-overhead, high-throughput solution in software configuration management (SCM). What's not as obvious is how Perforce solves the problem of web content management (WCM). Perforce is used in a wide range of WCM applications by:

  • organizations using an intranet for internal documentation
  • companies whose product is web content, not software
  • individuals, companies, and organizations with external web sites.

This paper surveys the Perforce deployment models currently in use for web content management, and identifies the features that make Perforce a suitable WCM solution.

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