Advanced Merge Tracking
Parallel development requires engineering teams to track file changes across multiple releases. Failure to do this properly can result in lost productivity due to broken builds and test failures, and in the worst case, regressions that ship to customers. Legacy SCM systems do little to assist engineering teams in tracking and merging file changes across code lines, and thus require teams to employ expensive manual or script-based processes to identify, track and when required, merge code from branch to branch.
AccuRev solves the problem of branching and merging through the AccuRev Stream Architecture and AccuRev Advanced Merge Tracking. AccuRev streams are active branches that can both inherit code from parent streams, and can push code to other streams. All file versions in AccuRev are stream-based, so that when it comes time to merge changes, the full history of all file changes is available and automatically tracked. This eliminates time-consuming and error-prone manual merge tracking processes. With AccuRev, files can be merged between parent and child streams, or across the stream hierarchy through the AccuRev Change Palette. Since creating new streams and merging changes between streams is simplified and efficient in AccuRev, teams can employ development processes that use as many branches as needed, without fear of losing track of important file history or merge information. Finally, the AccuRev streams allow for constant incremental merges as development progresses. Since merging is easy, teams can merge frequently, rather than waiting until the end of a release to perform a time-consuming and potentially destabilizing ‘big-bang’ merge of dozens or hundreds of files.
Key features
- Stream-based merge history available for all file elements
- Efficient codeline creation and management through AccuRev streams
- Code inheritance model of streams supports incremental merges
- Full merge tracking independent of file history (such as name or namespace changes)
- Visual 3-way merge tool assists developers in performing detailed merges on highly divergent file content