Re: Change management systems

[Vern Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

David

CMS can be a very general term - we are speaking of software change 
management here. There is also something called project change 
management, which is different.

I suggest looking at a couple of the product sites. 
www.arcadsoftware.com or www.mks.com (David's company) or www.thenon.net 
(See-change - someone recommended it here recently) and look for their 
reasons.

The iSeries has a lot of dependencies between object types. Rob 
mentioned a change in a PRTF. What impact does a change to a physical 
file have - how many logical files and programs need to be recompiled?

What happens when 2 or more developers work on the same source? How do 
you find source from an earlier version, in case you made a mistake? Or 
say that you accidentally deleted some source member? All this can 
happen, and a CMS can help rescue you from these problems.

It might be enough to do a checkout - checkin process - TAATOOLS has 
one, I believe, that works well for one of our customers. (www.taatools.com)

HTH
Vern

David FOXWELL wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As we are looking at the possibility of revamping our homegrown installation utility, I'd like to know more about CMS. I never even heard of CMS before subscribing to this list. I was wondering what I am missing. Is it really that complicated to write a utility that takes care of the development installation and everything that is impacted by it? How might we benefit from buying a CMS?
>
> Thanks.
>