AccuRev and Electric Cloud are entering a technology partnership aimed at improving software development productivity and efficiency in the software configuration management arena.
At the SD West 2008 show in Santa Clara, Calif., March 4, the companies announced that they are partnering to deliver a combined solution that integrates the automated build, test and deployment functionality of Electric Cloud’s ElectricCommander software with process-enabled SCM using AccuRev’s technology.
In addition, the offering will support multi-stage continuous integration and scalable agile best practices, said Cliff Utstein, vice president of marketing at AccuRev.
Utstein said multi-stage continuous integration is used to automatically build and test changes as they are pushed through each stage in the development process – stages that include code creation, integration, quality assurance and code reviews. Moreover, AccuRev supports the creation of a hierarchy, gives visibility into the changes at each stage and enables merging between stages. ElectricCommander provides the process automation to make multi-stage continuous integration scalable and repeatable.
For medium or large software development projects, a full integration build and test can take hours, during which time developers can put in additional changes to their SCM tool that may cause a build or test failure, Utstein said. The risk of build failure increases exponentially as the number and locations of developers grow, he said. In a continuous integration environment, build failures have an immediate impact on the productivity of entire development teams as the problem is diagnosed and fixed.
“Continuous integration and automated build/release processes are the backbone of shorter iterations and agile best practices,” he said. “AccuRev software is designed to enable these processes out-of-the-box, making a technology partnership with Electric Cloud a natural fit for AccuRev by completing the solution for software development teams.”
In a statement, Jim Bell, Electric Cloud vice president of marketing, said company officials are “finding more and more that enterprises are tying best-of-breed development tools together to provide a unified workflow.”