Git is by far the best Source Control Management Tool I've used. I would recommend it to anyone, whether it's an individual working on their own project, a small start-up company, or a huge organization with thousands of developers. Maintaining code via source control is absolutely mandatory for all developers everywhere.
Serena CM is well suited to highly controlled, audited, and process driven environments. It will allow strict segregation of duties, and change traceability. If implemented correctly it will help you quickly build trusts with your auditors. It is also well suited to environments that require constant branching and merging. Due to the complexity of the product and learning curve for your development and operations team it may be overkill in a small shop with loose rules
Git is designed to work in a distributed manner, allowing each developer to run a local node that has full control of the project. Through this, the developer is able to merge his work with others on a main 'branch' & work in sync without having to worry about stepping on your other developers toes.
Because Git has solved the software problem of dependency, users who commit code that needs to be deleted can just roll back to a restore point, saving precious development time & tons of headaches for Information Technology. This is also very helpful when cloning projects or creating new features on the current project.
Git has a beautiful command line interface that is intuitive, easy to learn & extensible. You can also observe all the changes you have made in your project throughout the development with just a few simple commands. This diverse set of command-line tools is easy for the end user & very powerful.
Code Promotion: Dimensions CM allows supervisors to control changes to code, in that they delegate requests to developers, and act as a gatekeeper prior to promoting to the next environment. This functionality is configurable so you can set up a workflow that best fits the structure and requirements of your own company.
Code Repository for changes and versioning: Code can be checked out by item or by synchronizing folders. Code revisions can be compared against other revisions or work files. Item histories show which developers made which modifications, and which supervisor and operations personnel were involved in assigning the request and promoting the code to each environment. Additionally a pedigree will show a stream diagram which graphically displays branches and merges.
Deployment: Serena Change Management offers help automating deployment including integrations with SVN and Jenkins. Its newer versions also have a powerful graphical deployment automation tool (Serena Deployment Automation- SDA). It comes with a certain amount of licenses built-in. If you have a many nodes to deploy to there will be separate licensing costs for that.
Some of the commands are a little obtuse if you're not using a Git Client
Since Git is so widely used in the development space, it's easy to believe that growth and innovation might become stale in the area of version control. Competition is sparse these days and I'm curious if this "Standard" is going to keep moving forward somehow.
It's hard to fault a tool that is so ubiquitous and hardly gets in your way.
The only major negative that I have encountered with Serena CM product is that the very power and flexibility of the tool means there is a risk that you will make a mess of things. In other words it gives you plenty of rope to tangle yourself with. I recommend careful, well thought out deployments implementing the built in roles and workflows that can be turned on and configured, using a consistent methodology.
My experience with the Serena help desk support has not been impressive. Though reasonably polite and diligent, the technicians were well trained, and often gave bad advise and terrible scripts. On several occasions I had to rewrite scripts they have me; if I had run them as provided they would have caused even more difficulties than the problem I was trying to solve. I speak of the support in the past tense because I conditioned myself not to call them, it was usually just easier to solve nay problems my self. They do have a good account management team though, and for any major issues you can go thru them.
Git has met all standards for a source control tool and even exceeded those standards. Git is so integrated with our work that I can't imagine a day without it.
I am not sure what the official Git support channels are like as I have never needed to use any official support. Because Git is so popular among all developers now, it is pretty easy to find the answer to almost any Git question with a quick Google search. I've never had trouble finding what I'm looking for.
GIT being a widely used tool have better reliability than its peers and have stands out when we compare it on operational performance criteria. GIT with speedy and extensive branching capabilities have helped developers to use check in their code quickly and space efficient way. GIT have the facility to quickly fetch the complete repository on to your local system.
Serena CM is superior to Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) in overall functionality, but does not have very good native integration with Microsoft. Therefore in a Microsoft centric shop with no audit needs ,TFS would be better. Otherwise I would choose Serena CM
Git has saved our organization countless hours having to manually trace code to a breaking change or manage conflicting changes. It has no equal when it comes to scalability or manageability.
Git has allowed our engineering team to build code reviews into its workflow by preventing a developer from approving or merging in their own code; instead, all proposed changes are reviewed by another engineer to assess the impact of the code and whether or not it should be merged in first. This greatly reduces the likelihood of breaking changes getting into production.
Git has at times created some confusion among developers about what to do if they accidentally commit a change they decide later they want to roll back. There are multiple ways to address this problem and the best available option may not be obvious in all cases.
Serena has facilitated our annual completion of various audit and technology control certifications. These certifications make a huge difference to our company's reputation and bottom line.
