ClearCase vs. SVN: Which Is the Best VCS For Your Team?
ClearCase and SVN are both historically popular version control systems. But they both present challenges for development teams.
Find out if ClearCase or SVN is the better VCS. And learn how to choose the best VCS.
Table of Contents
ClearCase vs. SVN
1. Collaboration
When SVN and ClearCase first came on the scene, hardware and software development projects rarely employed thousands of developers.
Today, it’s common. The following capabilities are often key to better collaboration.
Project Dashboard
If you’re using SVN or ClearCase, you already know there’s no dashboard. Dashboards with activity streams and web-based code management have become incredibly important to teams and their managers. 45% of respondents said managing projects, repos, and permissions was one of the top DevOps challenges.
Usually, dashboards come hand-in-hand with web-based code reviews. This is one of the most important ways teams collaborate today.
Code Review on the Web
Code review workflows that happen asynchronously are also an important driver of quality and developer productivity.
Today, most code reviews happen after a successful build. This helps ensure they don’t waste their colleagues’ time by asking them to review defective code.
The right version control system combines automation, dashboards, integration, and high performance with built-in web-based code review. Reviewers belong to groups, and they are instantly notified when it’s time to weigh in on the new code a colleague has submitted. This alleviates the stress of waiting. Even so, not all VCS have built-in code review apps.
For example, SVN has no built-in code review capability. You need to license a third-party product to implement code reviews.
Ability to Work With Git Teams
Git is the standard among software developers. However, SVN and ClearCase don’t have native Git management capabilities. So if you’re working with teams that use Git, that’s a problem.
The Best VCS For Collaboration
Helix Core gives you visibility into your projects with a dashboard.
Helix Core also includes a code review and collaboration solution. Helix Swarm is a flexible code review tool. It integrates easily with CI workflows. And it supports thousands of users and code reviews with innumerable projects.
Plus, with Helix Core, partnering with teams that use Git isn’t a problem. Helix4Git is an add-on option with Helix Core. It lets you store Git repos in the high-performance Helix Core server. With Helix4Git, teams can scale Git for accelerated collaboration and up to 80% faster builds.
Development teams access Helix4Git just like any other Git Server, so there’s no learning curve. Its intelligent cache speeds up access for remote site developers to their Git repos.
Helix4Git also lets you manage large binary files alongside Git source code. This dramatically accelerates large file transfers and improves pipeline performance.
Ready to learn more? Contact us to learn more about scaling Git with solutions from Perforce. >>
2. Speed
Another thing people need from their version control system? Speed.
Version control has a big impact on the performance and scalability you can achieve.
For example, ClearCase uses a proprietary file system that slows down common operations. The larger the number of assets, the slower the system.
Similarly, SVN is a single-server system, which limits performance and scalability.
The Best VCS For Faster Development?
By contrast, Helix Core has proven installations of 10,000+ users and petabytes of data.
Helix Core effortlessly supports thousands of users and millions of daily transactions. It accelerates Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery with lightning-fast commits and concurrent builds.
3. Support for Global Teams
Today, companies staff projects with talent where they find it — so an architecture that supports multiple, global facilities is absolutely essential.
With ClearCase, support for global teams only happens if you purchase and integrate a separate product — ClearCase MultiSite. For many companies, this requires managing copies of large assets at each geographically diverse location. Years ago, support for global teams was a strong point for ClearCase. Now, that support has fallen behind — a surprising trend, since there are more companies with global teams now than there were in ClearCase’s heyday.
With SVN, there is no enterprise-class replication technology to support a global workforce. You are limited by the capabilities of your WAN. The lack of server replication makes it difficult to collaborate on a global scale.
The Best VCS for Global Teams
By contrast, Helix Core offers an unparalleled set of technologies to support global teams. This includes an advanced replication technology, called Perforce Federated Architecture.
With Federated Architecture, teams get the performance they need to collaborate on a global scale. Global teams can access and manage files at LAN speed.
Try Helix Core >>
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More on SVN and ClearCase:
- How to Use SVN (and When to Migrate)
- Git vs. SVN
- ClearCase Source Control
