Traditional parallel development projects give each developer his own “development stream” in addition to the single project “integration stream.” Developers are free to check in their changes without sharing them with the rest of the team. When the accumulated changes are ready to be shared, and approved, the developer delivers the changes to the integration stream. While the changes will be visible on the integration stream for stabilization, builds, and testing, the other developers won’t have those changes inflicted on their development stream until they’re ready. The rebase operation accepts the changes in a new baseline from the integration stream into a development stream.

A project can use stream hierarchy to enable more complicated change flow scenarios. Intermediate streams can be created to receive delivered activities from development streams. Building, testing, or other activities can be done in the intermediate stream before the rolled-up work is delivered to higher-level integration streams.

The power of parallel development extends beyond a single project team. Organizations support multiple release trains concurrently, produce customized software variations for specific clients, and reuse components in different projects with distinct goals. UCM can control the flow of changes between projects at file, activity, and component granularity.





Globally Distributed Development
There are several patterns of distributed software development. Sometimes development is distributed between regional sites, each with significant development populations. Activities and artifacts can be shared between these sites by taking advantage of IBM Rational ClearCase MultiSite and IBM Rational ClearQuest MultiSite. These add-on products provide full replication of the activity and artifact repositories between distributed sites.

Projects often involve remote developers who are dispersed; these developers don’t form sites that warrant local replicas. Accessing remote servers collocated with the repositories over an HTTP-based protocol is a better solution. The ClearCase and ClearQuest web browser interfaces and the ClearCase Remote Client meet this need and are sensitive to the network latencies between the developers and the servers.

IDE Integration
Developers shouldn’t need to reach far to be plugged into the change management system. Both Rational ClearCase and Rational ClearQuest can be present in the developer’s Eclipse-based IDE, such as Rational Application Developer.

The ClearQuest Client for Eclipse presents developer functionality in a set of Eclipse views and a ClearQuest perspective. Developers can select and log in to a Rational ClearQuest database. The ClearQuest Navigator view organizes queries. Saved public and private queries can be run or new queries authored. A summary of the activities found by a query appears in the Query Results View. The Record Details View is the place to find all of the details about an activity as well as initiate state transitions and modifications. It’s easy to submit new activities – either in the ClearQuest perspective or from the Eclipse Problems view – that seeds the new activity with the information reported by Eclipse.