Polarion Software Weblog

This is part two of a three-part series discussing the story of Polarion’s Subversive Project. Celebrating the 8th birthday of Subversive, we had the opportunity to talk about the project with Igor Vinnykov, who led Subversive from its inception.

Read Part One

How did you launch the first version of Subversive?

We didn’t do anything special – just created a webpage where people can download Subversive and sent announcements to several Eclipse and SVN-related online issues. Since the beginning, the SVN community showed interest in this topic, and we received a growing number of downloads. It was important to build good communication with the community, so we launched a forum where project members and community activists can answer the questions about Subversive.
Another good communication channel was based on using automatic error reports. We created a special error handler in Subversive that, in case of a problem, displayed the dialog where a user can enter comments and their contact information when reporting a problem. The user can submit the error report that automatically creates a bug on our bug tracker with the data entered by them and the Java stack trace that identifies the reason of the problem. We were impressed by the effectiveness of this new communication channel because once we launched it, we started to receive more feedback than before. If we had a bug in a release, we got error reports in minutes and didn’t have to wait days until somebody found some free time to write about the problem in the forum. It’s also helpful to get the contact information of people reporting the problems because we can contact them directly to get details or ask them to try a code patch. Many of the problem reporters were nicely surprised to get personal replies from us and gladly helped us with troubleshooting.

What was the first feedback on Subversive like?

People like new things, and many Eclipse and SVN users gave Subversive a try. We tried to differentiate the project since the first release, and I think that our bet worked well. From the start, people discussed the advantages and disadvantages of two SVN plug-ins for Eclipse. At that point, we understood that we had our own community, and there were a lot of people who like what we do. In the first release, we couldn’t offer support on all of the existing SVN features, but in addition to the polished UI, we had some other things to offer to Subversive users. When we started to work on Subversive, we understood that it would be hard to implement quality UI because some important features were missing in the SVN interface. For example, if you ran a long SVN operation, you didn’t get the information about its progress and couldn’t cancel it. We discussed these limitations with the authors of SVNKit library, the library we use to communicate with SVN repositories, and asked them to implement progress reporting and operation cancellation as an extension to standard SVN interfaces. As a result, Subversive offered some extra features that people expected to see and couldn’t find in other tools, so the first feedback we received was good enough to move us forward.

What was your main priority after releasing the first version?

We had very busy days after the first release. In spite of the fact that Subversive was used for day-to-day work internally, we received quite a lot of bug reports during the first few weeks. In Polarion, we just had several repositories and the limited number of developers who used the project in a similar manner. When the project went to the wild life, the number of use cases and environments used to work with Subversive grew significantly, so hidden errors started to appear quite often. It’s a normal situation for every project, so the only thing that is required from the development team, in this case, is to resolve the problems as quickly as possible. We had to make several releases one-by-one to resolve the most frequent and important problems. When the number of error reports decreased, we returned back to our plans and started to work on the remaining SVN features.

In 2006, you submitted a proposal to move Subversive under the Eclipse umbrella. What were the reasons for that step?

In July 2006, we released Subversive version 1.0 that supported the full set of SVN features. The project was considered a mature project, and we needed to define the new goals to move forward. SVN users wanted to get a preinstalled SVN client in Eclipse, the same as CVS users get when they install Eclipse, and Eclipse Foundation had interest in this topic. Also, our users asked us to implement integration with other Eclipse tools like Mylar (now Mylyn) and Buckminster, so the project migration to Eclipse and Subversive integration into Eclipse was the expected step.

What was required from Subversive to move it to Eclipse?

Project migration was a pretty complicated process defined by various rules and guidelines explained in the different documents of Eclipse Foundation. The most time-consuming part of the process was finding all of the required information and understanding the requirements and steps that should be performed. It took up a bunch of my time, so if you plan to create an Eclipse project, you have to be ready to perform some extra work and some paperwork as well. Someone called it a bureaucracy because you need to work with the formal papers instead of working on the project code, but you need to keep in mind that Eclipse joins hundreds of projects managed by hundreds of people from different organizations together, so defining and checking guidelines is the instrument that helps to avoid chaos. I have to say that in the past couple of years, the number of formal Eclipse procedures has continuously decreased, making developers’ lives easier.
In order to join Eclipse, we created the written Eclipse project proposal that explained our vision. We defined our goals and project principles, represented the project architecture, and defined the interested parties who supported the project and our development plan. After the publishing of this proposal, it was openly discussed in the community. There was another Eclipse project proposal from the Subclipse team, and Eclipse Foundation suggested that we consider merging our two projects into a single one. There were some negotiations around this topic, but the Subclipse team decided to revoke their proposal and not move their project to Eclipse, so our proposal was accepted by Eclipse Foundation at the end.

The conclusion to Subversive’s story is coming up soon!

The story of the Subversive project begins in 2005, when Polarion assigned a development team to work on the open-source Eclipse client for Subversion (SVN). In the following years, Subversive changed from a new and almost unknown open-source project to one of the most popular plug-ins for Eclipse. Celebrating the 8th birthday of Subversive, we had the opportunity to talk about the project with Igor Vinnykov, who led Subversive from its early days.

What is the origin of the Subversive project? How was the idea to create an Eclipse client for SVN born?

Search volume for term “SVN” since 2004.
Source: Google Trends

In 2005, companies and organizations started to actively migrate their source code repositories from CVS to SVN. SVN became a stable technology that offered a number of advantages compared to CVS, so Polarion selected SVN to become a core infrastructure component for the business. We stored all of our projects in SVN repositories and worked on our ALM tool and other products, which were integrated with SVN. Our main development platform was Eclipse, which was lacking quality integration with SVN source code repositories back in the day.

We tried different available solutions but came to use a standalone Tortoise SVN tool to work with SVN repositories. It was quite ineffective for our team to continuously switch between Eclipse and Tortoise SVN. We used Eclipse CVS client in the past and loved the functionality of CVS integration created by Eclipse developers. By starting the Subversive project, our goal was to provide Eclipse users with the quality SVN client inspired by Eclipse CVS client concepts.

Did you consider an idea to join forces with the Subclipse team?

In 2005, Subclipse was a single available Eclipse client for SVN and, of course, we tried to use it in our development environment. It offered almost all the features available in SVN during that time, but as Eclipse users, we weren’t satisfied with it. There were a number of bugs, and the Subclipse user interface was far from the polished UI we were used to seeing in the CVS client. We had an idea to fix the most annoying bugs and improve the Subclipse UI, but after spending a couple of weeks on the Subclipse code analysis, we concluded that our vision was different from the approaches used in Subclipse at that time. And so the Subversive project was born.

I know that there are some people who think that it was a mistake to start another project instead of joining forces with Subclipse, but it often happens that different people or teams have a different vision about the same things. For example, there are multiple open-source development platforms, databases, libraries, and SVN clients, which were created to perform the same job but ended up being used for different approaches. It’s the reason why we have a diversity of choices nowadays, and I think that it’s good. With no doubt, some kind of competition helped both the Subclipse and Subversive project to evolve to their current levels.

When was it decided to make Subversive an open-source project?

Subversive was created as an open-source project since the beginning because other infrastructure components such as Eclipse, SVN, and SVN libraries were open-source projects as well. So it was the obvious step to create a SVN client for Eclipse as an open-source project. We started development in the internal repository and opened it several months later once the first public version of Subversive was rolled out. A few years later, we decided that moving Subversive under the Eclipse umbrella would help the project, and so since 2007, Subversive has its home at the eclipse.org site. However, the project is still developed and supported by the same team of Polarion developers who started the project.

Was it hard to start a new open-source project?

It was a new experience for our team. The most complicated thing was to find support in the SVN user community. On the one hand, we wanted to release the first version as soon as possible, so our efforts would be appreciated by users for whom the project was created. On the other hand, we understood that a lot of functionality would be missing in the first release, and our first impression to the community could turn out negative because of this. Therefore, we had to find a compromise between an early first release date and missing functionality in the first version.

How did you find that compromise?

In 2005, when we started the project, SVN already had a long list of features. To implement them all in the Eclipse client, we would have needed to spend over a year and a half working on an isolated project without long-term communication with the community. In addition, we understood that our project was in demand, and so we decided to implement only the critical features and leave the rest to the next iterations.
We started to create the code in the SVN repository and used Tortoise SVN to work with the repository. Once we implemented and updated features, we thought that it was the right time to start using Subversive by ourselves to check how it works in the real work environment. It was one of the most important steps for the project because in the beginning, we found several important problems that weren’t detected during the testing sessions and started to look at the project not only as developers, but as users. These first weeks gave us a fresh vision, and we quickly found features that were missing or required improvements.

Then we asked our Polarion colleagues to start using Subversive in their day-to-day work, and it was another breath of fresh air into the project.  Polarion used Subversive and – of course – Polarion ALM in all development projects from the beginning.  That’s the important point- receiving feedback from your own team is crucial, who can be your first users. Sometimes, it works even better than the traditional testing because you not only have test reports, but you also get information on how to improve the project. By using this approach, we reduced the time-to-release of the first version and were confident that the main features were stable in the release.

There was another point that we had to resolve before making the first release – how to awaken community interest in our project. In my opinion, Eclipse IDE is one of the excellent examples of the stylish, usable and well-designed user interface. In 2005, there was a big contrast of the polished UI of components created as part of the Eclipse IDE and UI of external plug-ins. Our goal was to fill this gap and create a plug-in that would not only be usable, but would also follow all the UI design concepts and be considered an integral part of Eclipse. We wanted to give SVN users the same level of comfort that CVS users had in Eclipse and simplify migration from CVS to SVN by creating an SVN UI similar to the CVS UI. But this wasn’t blind copying- it was a deliberate choice and our bet on the future of our project.

Stay tuned for the next post!

This February, employees, partners and guests gathered from all around the world to kick off the release of Polarion 2013. It was a pleasure to see everyone in one place, as the event reflected Polarion’s international presence, with partners from countries such as China, India, Japan, Brazil, and many more.

Hard work really does pay off. We’ve grown a lot so far, and it was exciting to hear our customers understand and recognize our values as equally valuable to their organizations. Customer speakers Christian Bucholdt (Credit Suisse), Reggie Burgess (Northrop Grumann), and Jim Mapel (Cyberonics) were present at the event.
We had a couple other guest presenters this year: testing guru Griffin Jones and Ovum analyst Michael Azoff. They each provided their professional perspectives on Polarion’s growth over the years, our company values, and Polarion’s bright future.

Our diligent employees and partners

Let’s not forget all of our Polarion employees and partners, whose efforts and determination made the Polarion 2013 release possible. During an intensive learning week, members of Polarion’s Technical and Sales/Marketing teams were split into two sessions, with separate presentations and activities to specifically train each group on how to help our customers.

Bonding in Prague

While the days were challenging and packed with learning, we made sure to squeeze in some fun during the evenings. Kick-Off was held in the beautiful city of Prague, and the entire group had the opportunity to bond during nighttime events, such as a sightseeing tour of Prague after dark. Attendees even had the chance to play some floorball, a popular sport in the Czech Republic.

It was truly exciting to have the opportunity to meet colleagues face-to-face, as most collaboration occurs remotely in different areas of the world. Before we knew it, Kick-Off was over, and attendees returned home with fresh insights, a wealth of new knowledge, and renewed enthusiasm that is sure to benefit customers old and new in the upcoming year.

In late February, Polarion Software proudly exhibited at Embedded World 2013, one of the biggest events around the topic of embedded systems.  Located in Nuremberg, Germany, our ever popular polar bear mascot was once again present at our booth, which provided some light-hearted entertainment.  But what stole the spotlight were our Medical Device and Automotive solutions, as both industries are heavily involved with embedded systems development.  Our fully integrated, web-based, and affordable solutions quickly sparked attendee interest and created plenty of booth traffic that fostered promising leads, ensuring we’ll be busy for a long time.

An honorable mention: Polarion was nominated for the Embedded Award 2013, where outstanding technical innovations in embedded technologies were selected as award nominees.

Maybe we’ll see you around in the upcoming months.  Polarion has become increasingly active in a variety of events, most notably STAREAST in Orlando, Florida.  Check out our Events Calendar to see where else we’ll be going, and hopefully we’ll see you there!

If you’ve seen my other post – “Polarion 2013 – Just Released” – you know we have just released version 2013 of the Polarion product line. That post summarizes the features we iteratively developed and released to our customers during the past year, but which are actually features of version 2013. (Yes, is a bit different from what you may be used to from other software companies… but it’s how we deliver new and enhanced functionality to our users on a regular, predictable basis.)

The purpose of this post is to highlight the new and noteworthy changes/features added to Polarion 2013 since Polarion 2012 SR3.  (A list of all the issues addressed in this release is provided in the Resolved Work Items file.) So let’s look now at the “latest-greatest” new things.

Diagraming

Create and edit many types of diagrams right in your LiveDoc™ specification documents.

Or attach them to work items.

And edit them in the online diagram editor

Searching Attachment Content

Work Item, Document, and/or Wiki attachment content is being indexed, so you can search for artefacts by searching the attachment content.

You can also search for attachments on the site search.

Duplicate Work Items

When duplicating work item, user can select what properties will be duplicated.

Document Attachments

It is possible to manage (add, remove, update…) document attachments in a same way as work item attachments.

System Engineering Project Template

New project template designed for system engineering, reflecting all the best practices of or Professional Services team

Connectors

Polarion Connector for HP Quality Center™ (HP QC)Platform Enhancements

Polarion Connector for Atlassian JIRA™

Platform Enhancements

External Repositories

The user-password in repositories.xml is encrypted

Custom Admin Changes

New API has been added to plug admin page for custom extension to Polarion Administration portal.

More…

For a summary of everything that has gone into the making of Polarion 2013 in the past year, see “Polarion 2013 – Just released”.

Or jump directly to:

•  SR1 - Robust handling of concurrent LiveDoc modifications: concurrent non-overlapping granular changes are automatically merged and people can easily review the result (and of course the history).
• SR2 - Work Items Table presentation: vertical/horizontal pane layout, an optional compact mode, and text wrapping in table cells.
• SR3 - Additional Custom Fields types: user role, project,  project group, build, document, wiki page.

Where to Get Polarion 2013

Polarion 2013 is a free update for customers with a current maintenance subscription. You can download the update distribution at http://www.polarion.com/downloads/update.php.