| Project Principal A Large US Government Research Lab |
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| "We work on a small project, with a small development team. Our team is 3 to 4 developers, one of who is also the project principal, an administrative staff person, and a technical editor. We all need to use the same tool for source code control, configuration and issue management. We researched several products. Two of us attended a weeklong class on a product similar in functionality to SpectrumSCM. After attending the class for the other product we decided that the product was too complicated and too inflexible to use for our entire team. Any changes to the design of components had to be done by scripts. It was incredibly tedious. We chose SpectrumSCM because of its simplicity of use, dynamic changing of components, email notification capabilities and cost. It has allowed us to easily do configuration control on source code, documentation, and deployment distributions. CR management allowed us to understand what other developers were doing and coordinate our concurrent efforts more effectively. Lists of things that needed to be accomplished were directly linked to code. This in turn helped to track down bugs we encountered. It was very useful for tracking our distribution files for CD creation. Previously, we spent countless hours debugging problems with our CD distribution that had to with out-of-date files. Once a CD distribution project was created, we were able to update and configure it without incident. We are beginning to use SpectrumSCM to manage large binary files for our distributions. It has shown a strong ability to handle large tasks such as this. The email notification is very useful in notifying other team members when specific CRs have been completed. Although our team is small, SpectrumSCM's design seems capable of accommodating more complicated roles than we require. We use Spectrum Software because it accomplishes what we need it to do, it fits into our budget and Spectrum provides timely, courteous and knowledgeable technical support." |
| Eric C., Senior MTS A Large US Telecom Company |
| "Spectrum SCM provided an efficient way to handle our source-code control and configuration management needs. We began a new project and SCM allowed us to get up and running very quickly. Spectrum SCM made source code control easy. We did not have to waste a lot of time performing mundane tasks. Our software builds were simple and quick. Spectrum SCM is the best configuration management tool that I have ever used. It is very powerful yet easy to learn. The graphical interface is very user friendly. The support is excellent and I would strongly recommend the product." |
| Jochen B., Senior Software Architect, Germany A leading provider of adaptive software for communication and information management on the basis of language technology and artificial intelligence |
| "With the growing complexity of our software and the need to maintain a number of different configurations, we quickly reached the end of the possible with CVS. As a consequence, we started looking for alternatives able to model the whole process of creating software. SpectrumSCM was the only affordable tool that provided us with a powerful versioning system, simple but extendable workflow engine and a release management in one simple to use bundle. With CVS, it wasn't possible for us to see what had been changed in our software between two releases. Developers would add all sorts of features and tweaks which we weren't all informed of. Now, however, they must use Change Requests which can be separately developed and tested and added to a new release (or left out). This way, we know exactly what was changed, who changed it and what is going to be in the new release. This increase in productivity alone (quality management knows what to test, documentation knows what to document, project manager can effortlessly create release notes) was worth the switch." |
| David M.R., VP, IT A US-Based Insurance Services Provider |
| "We found SpectrumSCM to be a good company that has been easy to do business with and one with a product that has proven to meet our needs. The support we’ve had has been very good. We’ve even recommended the solution to others in our industry who have similar needs as ours. We are using SCM to govern 5 of our internal software applications now and we’ll be adding two additional operations - our tech support team and our benefit services division into the realm of SCM. We have found the solution to be robust, adoptable and adaptable." |
| Ahilan A., Mac OS Software Developer A leading worldwide supplier of systems and software for vibration testing, structural dynamics and acoustic analysis |
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Why we selected SpectrumSCM: We were looking for a software configuration management system that would allow us to do development on Solaris, Linux, VxWorks, and Mac OS X. We needed a system that kept revision control and issue tracking tightly synced. In the past when someone checked in code and subsequently left our group, we'd have a lot of difficulty figuring out what that code change was for. Did it really solve the problem it was trying to correct? The programmer needs a place to record this information. And on the issue tracking side, we've tried source code independent issue tracking systems like Bugzilla. Unfortunately, Bugzilla can't tell us what changes we made to the code to correct the problem. It also can get out of sync. Sometimes bugs are found and fixed and are never entered into Bugzilla. Or a bug can be fixed but no one updates the Bugzilla database. SpectrumSCM has satisfied all these things for us and is considerably less expensive than the alternatives. Other CM tools which we had considered were out of our price range. Most companies with our size and budget have had no choice but to use free products like CVS, and suffer all the problems that it has. Another important advantage we've seen in SpectrumSCM is that it has an easy to use GUI. For programmers doing the basic checkin and checkout operations this isn't a big deal. But when managing releases, branching, and file history across branches everyone really needs some GUI representation. Most GUIs for SCMs are weak. Also, in other SCM tools the issue tracking interface is separate from the revision control interface. It feels tacked on, because it is. With SpectrumSCM, there's one user interface for everything. Our experience with the company and the support group: We've been very pleased with the support we've received. Spectrum Software flew an engineer to our location and gave us a 3 day tutorial. When we've had questions or concerns, we could speak directly to engineers who develop the software. The turn around time has been very quick. We'd often get software fixes within 24 hours. Their development team has always taken interest in any feature requests we've made. Everyone we've dealt with at Spectrum Software has gone through great lengths to assure that we're satisfied with their product. |
| Kannan V., VP, Finance & Operations US Jetting, Georgia |
| "We are extremely excited about using SpectrumSCM. We're particularly enthusiastic about SpectrumSCM’s integrated features that will enable us to tie our life-cycle activities associated with our ERP system, particularly with reference to material and manufacturing planning. SpectrumSCM will offer us significant cost savings and productivity gains through real time communication between our sales, engineering and operation teams." |
| Dennis B., Principal Software Engineer A Large US Defense Contractor |
"Some of the reasons we selected SpectrumSCM are:
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