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Cutting Software Development Time

Rational ClearCase Users Run
"Merges" & "Builds" 2.5 Times Faster

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Introduction
Software development has always been a complex, collaborative and time-consuming iterative process. It has always taken time to build a solid team, educate team members, partition the work and pull it all together to produce a complete, comprehensive and working system.

Today, one thing has changed - a high quality result must be produced sooner.

Faster time to market requirements, driven by Internet developments, rising customer expectations and fiercer competition has changed the key time element. Development cycles that permitted months now allow only weeks or, in the most demanding situations, even just days for project completion. Once completed, project definitions change frequently, requiring developers to change yet again - and these changes must be made quickly and accurately. No longer can a product be released with missing features. Nor can a product be released with errors since the instant the software is released and on-line, customers use it immediately and the errors show up instantaneously. Today, software must be completed on time or ahead of schedule without any mistakes. Time has become the most precious resource in software development.

But how is it humanly possible to keep producing more and increasingly complex software in less time? Developing software is a time-consuming, detail-oriented and error-prone process requiring expertise, skill and discipline. The only way to improve the quality and timeliness of the process is to improve the process and execute faster.

FlashDisk Ultra-High Performance

The typical software development process incorporates a wide variety of tasks, many of which creates high disk I/O demands in both random and sequential modes at various stages in the development process. FlashDisk OpenRAID is an ultra-high performance "open systems" RAID disk array that speeds every step of the development process to accelerate completion and reduce development cycle times.

FlashDisk OpenRAID is designed for speed. It is used in the most demanding applications in the world to speed I/O intense applications. It delivers up to 13,000 I/O operations per second for random access applications including e-commerce, software development, database, financial, manufacturing, publishing and more. It also delivers up to 177 MB per second data throughput for sequential applications including video and audio streaming, file copying, backup, data warehousing, data mining, data acquisition and more.

Software development has always been a leading-edge industry that benefits greatly from a high-speed computing infrastructure. For the past 30 years or more, software developers have always opted to equip their projects with the best hardware available since the labor costs have always been relatively high and the work always critical - and never more so than today. Since the software development process is especially storage-heavy and disk intensive, it is a unique industry in that it benefits from both the high-speed sequential performance and high-speed random performance of high-speed data storage like FlashDisk OpenRAID.

Rational ClearCase Version Control

Software developers everywhere have the same version control issues and have individually and collectively recognized the value using the best version control system available - and they have selected Rational ClearCase* with such frequency to make it a nearly universal industry standard.

Rational ClearCase configuration management software offers many administrative functions and creates and maintains a "multi-version" repository of artifacts. This repository stores, and makes available for recall, any and all versions of every development artifact related to the software development process including requirements documents, specifications, code, test plans, test data, test procedures and related objects. When items are entered into this repository, they are "merged" and when they are retrieved, the results are considered "views" that are presented to the requestor. Finally, Rational ClearCase performs complete "builds" that result in executable versions of the software. It is the "merge" and "build" functions that are the most time-consuming.

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