| AllChange
offers a "customize everything" approach
By Mike Gunderloy
cmcrossroads.com
Intasoft has been around since 1986, and AllChange dates back
almost that far itself. With nearly two decades of development
behind it, AllChange is a mature change management system
that is almost infinitely flexible, as well as sometimes a
bit quirky in its nomenclature.
If you can devote the time to setting it up and learning how
it works, though, you'll very likely find that AllChange can
take your existing business processes and automate them without
a problem.
Some CM products take the approach of defining what they think
is the ideal approach and telling you to constrain your workflow
to fit. AllChange is about as far from that as you can possibly
imagine. Want to process feature requests from external users
and feature requests from internal marketing according to
two different workflows? No problem; define separate classes
of change requests, use the included graphical lifecycle editor
to come up with the workflows, and away you go. Want to enforce
the entry of certain information on every new change request?
The administrator can define this as well. Indeed, AllChange
comes with an almost overwhelming number of ways for the administrator
to customize things. It's no accident that they have consultants
and training courses to help you learn how to use this stuff.
One of the areas of quirkiness within AllChange is its terminology.
For example, the lowest level of management is the part, rather
than the file. But there's a reason for this: AllChange is
not limited to software configuration management. A part might
be a source code file, or a circuit board, or an entire subsystem
composed of more than one parts. Subsystems can be arranged
in a hierarchy of arbitrary depth. In this way, you can apply
change management principles to your entire product whether
it's software, hardware, a mix of the two, or something else
entirely. AllChange could even be applied to collecting paperwork
for mortgage transactions or writing a collaborative novel
with sufficient customization. I can just imagine posting
a change request to a co-author demanding more action in Chapter
5!
You can of course perform standard version control operations
on parts that happen to be files including check in and out,
diff, branch and merge. But you can go significantly beyond
version control by using AllChange's change request facility
and using lifecycles to integrate the parts and the change
requests. AllChange includes many automation facilities. For
example, creating a change request and associating it with
a part can trigger an entire cycle of actions, with defined
transitions between states and specific approval steps. AllChange
is smart about sending e-mail notifications to those affected
by a new change request, and will also allow you to set up
a monitor to notify you of anything you care about (for example,
any changes to a particular part).
There's much more to AllChange than just managing parts and
changes. There's a whole system of roles and security. There's
a report generator for the manager who needs to get a summary
view of what's going on with a project. There's a build system.
In fact, it's hard to find a change management concept that
hasn't taken root somewhere in AllChange.
You can use AllChange with a variety of other applications.
There's integration with IDEs, as well as with Word and Excel
and even Windows Explorer. Or, if you prefer, you can use
AllChange's own dedicated GUI client. Other applications that
AllChange can work directly with include Telelogic DOORS,
Mercury TestDirector, Dreamweaver, and the Unipress Footprints
help desk system.
AllChange works in either direct or client/server modes. In
direct mode, the AllChange applications are operating directly
on the database files (which might be on a shared network
drive). A large installation will more likely use the client/server
mode, where a dedicated server process handles file access
for all connected clients.
Adopting a system like AllChange is not a move to be taken
lightly. In addition to the licensing costs of the software,
you need to plan on training for key administrators and users,
and set aside time to actually perform the customizations
that you require (or the money to pay a consultant to do them).
But if you've been feeling pushed around and constrained by
the other change management systems that you've tried, AllChange
offers a sure way out with its "customize everything"
approach. If you want to have a look for yourself, you can
download a fully-functional trial version from the Intasoft
Web site.
Mike
Gunderloy , MCSE, MCSD .NET, MCDBA is an independent
software consultant and author working in eastern Washington
. He's the editor of ADT Magazine's Developer Central newsletter
and the online Daily Grind (
www.larkware.com ), and the author of numerous books and
articles.
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