IBM Rational ClearCase 7.0: Master the Tools That Monitor, Analyze, and Manage Software Configurations

Undeniably, IBM Rational ClearCase is one of the major Software Configuration Management (SCM) tools on the market, and an integral part of a development environment. It introduced significant novelties into SCM, making it an original and insightful tool, and it's precisely these features that are often underutilized by ClearCase users. This book will show readers how to use ClearCase to its full potential and take advantage of its build auditing and dependency analysis applied to derived objects, workspace management with dynamic views, and its support for distributed development with ClearCase MultiSite. Through mastering ClearCase tools, this book will demonstrate that ClearCase is for users, and not only for the administrators.

The book capitalizes on the main competitive advantage of ClearCase: that, thanks to build avoidance, ClearCase can focus on and identify derived objects through build management. This practical guide will help you master the tools for monitoring, analyzing, and managing software configurations with ClearCase.

The book spends as little time as possible setting the scene. It delves straight into the ClearCase essentials of Build Management, which serves as the basis for the whole book.

By the end of the book you will have learned how to master and optimize the various tasks pertaining to both administration and day-to-day development, in both a single-site and a multi-site environment. The emphasis is on ensuring the collaborative management of software development. Special attention is paid to third-party tool management under ClearCase and many practical examples are given, with a particular focus on the command line and scripting as a means to maximize flexibility and management over one's work.

This book is a practical guide that highlights and demonstrates those specific functions not traditionally expected from an SCM tool, and supported only by ClearCase.

About the Authors

Marc grew up and graduated in France (MSci - Supélec 1983). He moved to Finland, where he lived over 20 years, then to Ireland. He worked first as a software developer, later as a ClearCase administrator and build engineer. He is currently working for LM Ericsson in Athlone, Ireland. He invested similar passion into several technologies over his career: Transputers and Occam2, C++, and since 1994, ClearCase.

Tatiana (Tanya) Shpichko was born in Moscow, Russia. She got an early interest for mathematics and programming, which developed into a lifelong passion in the secondary mathematical school number 179. She graduated from Moscow State Technical University of Electronics and Mathematics with a MSci degree in Computer Science. Tatiana started to do software development back in 1989, and has been programming in Pascal, C, C++ and Java. She first started to use ClearCase as a developer and then moved to work as a ClearCase administrator in 2005.