« IBM Rational ClearCase UCM — estimate the impact of a tool in a project

When you estimate stories you have to consider also some “external” things that can effect your project.

I never used before Clear Case, well, it’s the winner for this month of the (right now introduced category) office for complication of simple things (direct translation from the Italian Ufficio Complicazione Cose Semplici UCCS).

It’s very configurable, very complex, what for?

The fact in my humble opinion is that if you’ll ever have a client that force you to use that tool as revision control system you’ll have at least consider 1hour every day spent in various strange problems/errors and also the frustration of the dev team! In total, one ideal man day every week can be a good number. I don’t like that tool, indeed.

You can also consider maybe to mitigate this using subversion and then do a weekly commit from subversion to the Clear Case Box so that the Bosses upstairs are happy… :-D

IBM Rational ClearCase UCM — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Unified Change Management is a layer built on Rational ClearCase to provide additional Software Configuration Management features. These changes include integration with ClearQuest to enforce defect and change tracking with code development through the use of activities. This is part of the Rational Unified Process which describes the lifecycle of change management for IBM Rational’s software development process. It also gives integrators ownership of projects and streams to allow policy and feature management by project leaders and release engineers. UCM removes the ability/requirement that users manage a configuration specification for a view. UCM is used and configured via either CLIs or GUIs.