Yesterday, we’ve had a presentation made by Serena (ex-Merant, ex-Intersolv), editor of such gems as Dimensions, PVCS and TeamTrack.
I have not had much exposure to Serena’s tools, but I’ve worked for a company that used PVCS. It was incredible slow and heavy, enough so that the remote teams ended up using their own local version management system. Guillaume Tardif and I promptly replaced it with Perforce (thanks guys for such a good tool). I was also involved in an audit done at an insurance company. They were apparently the first French customer using TeamTrack. I remember them complaining that it was heavy and buggy…
Anyway, the funny thing is that Serena has plenty to say about Scrum! Half of the sliders were about what Scrum was… and how well their tools (especially TeamTrack?!) fit into it. Well, the guy did admit that they would need time to configure the tools first. But, after that, they can be *so* light and adaptable to each Sprint!
Seriously, do we still need such beasts nowadays? Please tell me only companies foolish enough to aim for some CMMi level still buy that.
OK, these guys do seem to have one interesting thing to say. Apparently, they were the initiators of the Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF). Sounds reasonable interesting.
