Edit: Given the recent downvoting (+8/-6 at this point) it was made clear to me that Gartner's lifecycle is a biased metric from a programmer's perspective. This is something that is part of a paper I'm going to present to management, and management types are part of Gartner's audience. Giving DVCS exposure & enthusiasm (that could be deemed as hype, or at least attacked as such), think about the following question when reading this one: how could I use Gartner's hype cycle to convince management that DVCSs are ready (or ready-enough) for us, and that it is not just hypeJust asking if DVCSs is hype wouldn't be constructive, Gartner's hype cycle is a more objective instrument than just asking that (even if this instrument is regarded as biased). If you know any other instrument please, by all means, mention it.Edit #2: I agree that Gartner's Life Cycle is not for every technology, but I consider it may have generated enough buzz to be considered hype by some, so it maybe deserves to be at least evaluated/pondered as such by using this instrument in order to prove/disprove it to whatever degree. I'm an advocate of DVCS, BTW.Edit #3: Thanks for your answers. Bounty goes to Caleb for answering my question with detail and practical advise. Accepted answer goes to philosodad for providing another useful instrument and answering beyond my question.I'm doing research for a whitepaper I'm writing in favor of DVCS adoption at company and I stumbled upon the concept of social proof. I want to prove that the social proof of DVCS adoption is not necessarily cargo cult and doing further research I now stumbled upon Gartner's hype cycle which describes technology maturity in 5 phases.My question is: what could be an indicator of the current location of Distributed Version Control Systems (I mean git, mercurial, bazaar, etc. in general) at a particular phase in the hype cycle?... in other (less convoluted) words, would you say that currently expectations of DVCSs are a) starting, b)inflated, c)decreasing (disillusionment), d)increasing (enlightenment) or e)stabilizing (mature) and (more importantly) why?I know it is a hard question and there is subjectivity involved, but I'll grant the answer (and the traditional cookie) to the clearest argument/evidence for a particular phase.
Where could Distributed Version Control Systems currently be in Gartner's hype cycle?
research;dvcs;cvcs
The hype cycle measures the amount of news/buzz that a particular thing generates, not the actual use of the thing or it's actual productivity value. So... I would say that from that perspective, DVCS is reaching a spike in its news cycle. Enough people are actually using it and encouraging other people to use it that it is getting a lot of buzz in the tech world. Once adoption is more widespread, I expect that news/buzz to fade a bit when something new and shiny comes along, and then rise again as people start to understand the systems more completely.One way to look at the hype cycle is to look at the number of new adopters. The number of new adopters of a technology tends to follow the same exact curve shape as the hype cycle. It makes sense that the buzz around a given new technology is going to grow rapidly as the technology gains a large number of new adopters. The early adopters spread the innovation, and the middle adopters generate the buzz.The buzz during rapid adoption of an innovation is neccessarily poorly informed. If there are a lot of people who know of something but don't know about it, they are going to have different and possibly greater expectations than experienced users. So that's where the hype comes from.The buzz after the rate of adoption has peaked is going to fall off... partly because earlier, unrealistic expectations have not paid off (DVCS will make you more productive, perhaps, but it won't fix all your problems) and partly because something else is going through a rapid adoption period and is taking up all the mindshare. Hype is fickle.But at some point, you start getting a fairly constant rate of new adopters, the innovation has become the norm, and the new adopters want to know how to use this thing that they've already decided they need to use. Then the buzz around the innovation is all about what people actually are doing with it now that they are using it, rather than what they could do with it if they were using it.So if you took the hype curve and put it next to the S-Curve of adoption rates (See Everett Rogers Diffusion of Innovations) you would expect the hype to peak where the S-curve is steepest, trough as the S curve changes direction, and rise again as the innovation reaches its full market saturation. DVCS is in a period of rapid adoption, so we're probably somewhere around the peak of the hype cycle. 