Change Synergy

sammyc - Tue Nov 24 21:08:26 EST 2009
Very mature - this was originally the Continuus product from the mid 90's and has a significant market share on a global basis. Has been ranked by analyst groups in the top 1 or 2 positions for CM tools repeatedly for many years.

doors36677 - Wed Nov 25 06:54:30 EST 2009
This sounds like something written by an IBM employee with a bias.

From what I have seen DOORS change integration leaves a lot to be desired and is to expensive, to hard to implement and not well supported. In another words you pay through your nose to get any support from IBM to get DOORS Change Integration to run.

doors36677 - Wed Nov 25 06:54:30 EST 2009
This sounds like something written by an IBM employee with a bias.

From what I have seen DOORS change integration leaves a lot to be desired and is to expensive, to hard to implement and not well supported. In another words you pay through your nose to get any support from IBM to get DOORS Change Integration to run.

Stephen_Baynes - Wed Nov 25 11:19:10 EST 2009
As someone who has been using this tool family for 10 years since the Continuus days.

My recollection is Change was introduced about 5 years ago. It was a big improvement on Continuus/PT that came before. Change is still continuing to develop.

I would say the strength of Change is its excellent links to Synergy. If you use Synergy as your CM tool then using Change as your change control tool is a no brainer. I can't comment on the quality of the DOORs - Change integration - we have never deployed it. As a stand alone change control tool, Change is competent and robust. It is reasonably well featured but not best in class when it comes to features. One feature that Change has that many tools miss is that it understands the concept of data replication between databases. Could be useful if you have loosely linked organizations that need to share some data but don't want a common database or can't have a common database (eg due to security restrictions).

One thing to be aware of is the hassle of installing Synergy which is needed so you can run Change and this would make if difficult to recommend Change for stand alone use without some other good reason.

Looking at the IBM roadmaps it might be better to consider the Jazz based Rational Change Manager as this would give you a smother path going forward.

sammyc - Wed Nov 25 11:27:25 EST 2009
My profile also describes my IBM position. The Jazz roadmap for change mgmt will use the same repository as used for Change and there will also be an available transition from Synergy Change to the Jazz based chng mgmt function if desired. Many customers have told us that Change will continue to be their core solution and may add the Jazz the chng mgmt features to other groups as needed but all will use the same repository. This applies to all of the Rational products that will share a common Jazz repository object set. There are several roadmaps available to customers under NDA if you are interested.

kbmurphy - Thu Dec 10 18:45:51 EST 2009
sammyc has never hidden the fact that he's an IBM employee and has been very helpful, though it would help if he used a signature that stated that he worked for IBM.

Anyhow, I set up the Telelogic Change at a client last year. I never got to see the whole thing through to the DOORS Integration piece, and all of what I'm about to say is from my memory which may be a little foggy.

First, Change is rather expensive and intensive to set up. You will NEED consulting. The documentation is a joke (worse than RPE). My client actually had a guy do a training session for a few days and then set up a workflow. This was a over a period of five days.

I bet when Change is sold to customers they are told things like "When a ticket transitions between states say submitted to approved, for example that Change can send an email to relevant stakeholders." This is NOT out-of-the-box functionality. The scripts to do this come from Professional Services, and Telelogic support would not answer my questions about what certain functions in the scriptdid. I had to contact the guy who came out and trained us. Further, it had been years since I programmed in Perl, but I was able to make an improvement so that far fewer support files were needed to make this work (basically you needed one file per transition to do things like set up a subject line and email template, very tough to maintain).

Also, if you don't want a full-time Change consultant, you'll need someone who is familiar with HTML and Perl, Change concepts, and likely DOORS. There aren't a lot of these people. On top of that, (at least as of last year) there was not a lot of activity on the Change forums, and asking a question would likely get you no response. In other words, customization outside of the program is risky.

I didn't find that setting up a workflow was intuitive. There were way too many options at times, and then having to go to different screens that seemingly weren't related to the screen I was working on to get things to work right.

That all being said, once the workflows were set up (which takes LOTS of planning before touching Change), the software did seem OK. Like I said, though, I just implemented it; no one really USED it while I was around.

I don't know how Jazz will change things, but even using DOORS, I wouldn't necessarily be so keen on Change. I bet the DOORS integration works well when it is working, but the fact is that there just isn't as much documented knowledge out there as ClearQuest or some other programs. In other words, you are really beholden to IBM if you go the Change route.

This is all just my opinion, based on setting up and configuring the application for one client, who did not heavily use the software while I was around. So keep that in mind.

SystemAdmin - Tue Dec 15 12:01:09 EST 2009
I have to agree with kb on this feedback.
Change is a complicated tool to take from an idea to a reality.
Last year, I did the same type of install for another division of our company and the install & setup documentation for both CM Synergy & Change was a total nightmare. I had to work thru Telelogic support for several weeks to get it working.
Same thing was experienced on a planned upgrade which eventually did not happen after the management moved support for configuation management software to another group. They have now made plans to move it all to something else like PVCS or Clear Case the last i heard.
If I had not done all the prep work for the upgrade we had been planning, I would have not made it thru the new install at our other company division.
NOTE: We have had CMSynergy 6.3\Change4.3 running at our own division since before I came into the picture back in 2006.
I was asked to step in and support it, really did not know what I was getting into back then.
The version we had was Synergy 6.3 on Unix with Informix as the backend. Change was also running and is accessed via a web browser at each client. This requires setup on the Synergy & Change server to support viewing from users web browsers. The original admin had left the company, and had not done a "typical install" so it was a lot of work to figure out what was going on in the existing setup.
In the meantime they also wanted me to prepare for upgrading to CM Synergy 6.5-Change 4.7 on Unix with Oracle as backend since no one else was Informix DBA trained at our company. The company wanted to have more than one person from the Oracle support side and thus get away from Informix.
We also did not integrate it with DOORS, and boy am I glad we didn't.
When I went to the other division to setup Change, it was for a Telelogic trained Change Admin, however, she was not trained to install and maintain Synergy which is required to run Change. In addition, you have to deal with the license server, and the web browser interface, constant patches from Telelogic now IBM, etc.
To say the least, it was a 5 day trip with numerous call backs for help since many things needed to be done in Synergy to make-keep Change working.
Last, our whole company is now looking at something else for CM type tools.

The idea is to settle onto a tool that is easier to support .

SystemAdmin - Tue Dec 15 12:10:41 EST 2009
At the other site we installed CM Synergy 6.5-Informix on Windows & Change 4.7, which was much easier to do than on the Unix servers & with Oracle in my own division.
Of course the Unix server platform is more robust... it just requires someone who enjoys typing EVERYTHING onto a command line and whole heartedly believes windows are something better to look out of than a way to work in a corporate office environment... ;)