title: Does ClearCase fit our development process?
body: <p>So, let me describe our current situation. We are a small team (6) of experienced Java developers, lost in a big IS team that is composed in majority with SAP and Siebel configurators.<br>
  While all the other teams were currently using VSS, mostly as a vaulting system, our team had switch for Subversion (after evaluating DVCS as well) as it best fits our agile methodology.</p>
  
  <p>Now, everyone is asked to move to ClearCase, and all the migration effort is put on the VSS users as they are the biggest part of users.<br>
  As we are left on our own and don't know really ClearCase, we have some fear that it won't fit our current work process.</p>
  
  <p>Here is currently how we are working on a daily basis:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>SVN repository follows the /trunk, /branches, /tags structure.</li>
  <li>Each developer has its own sandbox in the repository, for testing and prototyping purpose.</li>
  <li>We intensively use branches for new feature development, and are used to merge them together to do some integration testing before promoting them back to the trunk.</li>
  <li>Working in Java, we are used to do refactoring, and Eclipse is a great help for that. A lot of classes and packages renaming is done everyday.</li>
  <li>Depending on how the projects evolved, some pieces may be reused, resulting in a split of a project in several project, the original remains integrated through the svn:external property.</li>
  <li>We use keyword substitution for some elements as it's a extremely simple way to know for the tester what revision he's testing.</li>
  <li>Our Subversion repository is linked to Hudson for running test suites and promote valid builds by tagging them.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>All that I know about ClearCase for the moment is that we'll have to use it through CCRC (or via its eclipse plugin version), and that it is highly encouraged that we linked most of our projects to a ClearQuest project for issue tracking management.</p>
  
  <p>Could you enlighten us about how well ClearCase will substitute our Subversion, what concepts have an exact match (I don't care about synonyms but really about concepts), and what kind of changes could you foreseen in the whole process.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>