Migrating from Rational ClearCase LT to Rational Team Concert

Last year, IBM announced it was withdrawing Rational ClearCase LT from marketing , meaning end of the road for the product. For a few years, IBM had positioned CCLT (with disappointing results) as a competitor to Subversion (which it really wasn’t). To be fair, CCLT does thinks Subversion does not – such as distributed storage, automated branching and merging. It also required a (near) full time admin to understand it. Subversion was simply easier to install and configure for most teams, and only that 1% of customers really needed the advanced features. Yes, I’ve used CCLT. I’ve installed it, upgraded it, migrated, and otherwise wrestled with it. It certainly had its place. Its bigger brother is certainly more powerful, and for large distributed development teams, it fills a niche very well.

Many customers however, just did not need or use some of the advanced features. Now they have to figure out what to migrate to, and there are three good options:

1. Upgrade to full ClearCase – This is a good option if a customer is already used to UCM, they like the standalone client for their development, perhaps they are not using an Eclipse or Visual Studio based client, and they would like dynamic views. This option has a very fairly easy upgrade path, but with some additional licensing costs. The system administration is near identical save for the addition of managing dynamic views.
2. Migrate to Subversion – This is an option for customers who really just want to downsize. Perhaps they are very small shops with only a few developers and CC was overkill. The disadvantage is that you lose automated branching and merging, but also lose the licensing costs.
3. Migrate to Rational Team Concert – RTC has been out for a while, and if you search for RTC on the interwebs, you’ll probably come right back to this blog 🙂 For small teams, RTC Express-C is free for up to 10 developers. You can import a UCM stream directly into RTC using the ClearCase History Import tool. This IMHO, is the best route, as you now add all the awesomeness of RTC into the mix. You still get developer sandboxes, and can manage different team streams. Now you also get work item tracking (defects, tasks, enhancements, stories), automated builds, traceability, agile iteration planning, and dashboards. RTC express-c is dead simple to setup. Team Concert Standard, and Team Concert for Power Systems requires a bit of planning however. This is the strategic direction that IBM is going.

I should say, a fourth option is to just be stubborn and stay on ClearCase LT. That means your other tools will be held back from evolving also. I recommend that you research your application lifecyle management. Do you have a process methodology? Do you want to move to looking at your application development from a holistic approach? Do you want to begin incorporating test management early in the development lifecycle? Are you contemplating automation for your environment (build automation, test automation, audit automation, etc)? If any of these apply, then I recommend you take option 3 above.

The Jazz team had very nice article about importing in ClearCase Base and UCM histories (see the link). The importer creates work items that contain useful information about the Base or UCM ClearCase label type as a result of bringing over this change for a back reference into ClearCase.

If an RTC implementation/migration is of interest to you, give us a shout, and we can help you set up a road map from pilot to production usage. We offer full implementation services for RTC, including deployment, licensing, training, and mentoring. We also offer DevOps as a service (SaaS based RTC).