QVCS Product Family Newsletter - August 2005

Publication date: August 4, 2005

Contents

• Welcome
• QVCS/QVCS-Pro: 3.9 is in the Pipeline
• QVCS-Enterprise: Some Reporting Tips

Welcome

Welcome to the first QVCS product family newsletter. We're just getting off the ground, so your suggestions for content, and organization are most welcome.

QVCS/QVCS-Pro: 3.9 is in the Pipeline

QVCS/QVCS-Pro 3.9 should appear sometime in mid-September. The BIG new feature for this release will be support for directory recursion within QWin. This is a feature I have wanted for years -- ever since I saw it within Borland's Starteam product.

The basic idea is there is a toolbar button that you click to enable directory recursion. When it is enabled, the file list panel will display the files in the currently selected directory and ALL the files in ALL directories beneath the selected directory. This feature combined with the 'Workfile status' column introduced in the 3.8 release will make it very easy to see at a glance all the files in a project that are out-of-date.

This is all working 'in-house' and beta testing has begun. If you are interested in helping with the beta, please send e-mail to: jimv@qumasoft.com.

Release 3.9 will be a free update for those who have purchased or updated their licenses within the past year. The cutoff date will probably be around September 15, 2004 meaning if your license was issued after September 15, 2004, the 3.9 release will be a free update for you.

Of course, you can always buy or update your license now, and be guaranteed that the 3.9 release will be a free upgrade for you ;-).

Follow this link for a few more details: http://www.qumasoft.com/weblog/archives/07-01-2005_07-31-2005.html#74

QVCS-Enterprise: Some Reporting Tips

QVCS-Enterprise can generate some pretty detailed reports. For example, with the right filters defined, you can easily generate a report that will show you the set of revisions that have changed between labeled releases of your product. The summary report can show you both the number of files that changed, as well as the number of separate changes that have been made. It's all very flexible, and pretty cool. I suspect, however, that it's not documented as well as it could be, so it doesn't get used as often as it should.

I use it here all the time -- for example, when I supply the statistics on how many changes to how many files were made in a specific release (see the entry for the 3.8.18 release here: http://www.qumasoft.com/qvcsHistory.html for example), I use the reporting capability of QVCS-Enterprise to generate those figures.

You can easily do the same thing if you follow some simple rules:

• ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS apply a label to any file that you checkin if that file is part of a product release. For example, for the current work on QVCS/QVCS-Pro, for any check-in right now, I'm applying a 3.9.x label. The 3.8.20 label has already been applied and is now cast in stone (since it is a public release).
• Also apply a 'floating' label to every file that is part of your product.

To generate a report that shows the changes that have been made between release 1, and release 2, you'd follow these steps:

• On the client, select the View/Maintain Filters... menu option.
• On the 'Maintain Filter Collections' dialog, create a new collection, and add the following 3 filters:
  • Add a 'With label and all revisions' filter. Use the floating label as the filter data.
  • Add a 'After label (include if label is missing)' filter. Use the label you associated with release 1 of your product as the filter data.
  • Add a 'Up to label' filter. Use the label you associated with release 2 as the filter data.
• Click OK.
• Select the newly defined filter from the drop down filter combo on the toolbar.
• Enable the 'Show all children' button on the toolbar.
• Select the 'View/Generate Report' menu option.

Poof. The generated .html file should have only those revisions that were checked in between the two labels, and at the top of the report, there will be the summary information about how many files changed, and how many separate revisions were checked in.