Does anyone know of any documents comparing the scm abilities of RTC vs clearcase. For example, what sorts of things could make a project more suitable for clearcase instead of RTC for a SCM solution ?

Thanks in advance

Rob

RTC and ClearCase are very different in many respects. RTC addresses a much broader set of capabilities, including agile planning, work items and richer reporting and metrics than ClearCase. RTC's scm component is also designed for centralized, WAN access whereas ClearCase supports a more decentralized approach. RTC leverages the common services of the Jazz platform so it supports collaboration, team awareness, a common security model, dashboards and reporting and all artifacts in the repository have URI links to them. RTC captures traceability across change sets, work items and builds automatically as you perform work.

There are some features in ClearCase that make it unique to any scm such as support for dynamic views (a virtual file system, rather than a copy based scm model) and support for distributed servers so that the repository can span many physical servers but look like one to the user. RTC achieves this through centralized, vertical scaling on one server instance. In RTC 2.0 you can also have cross project links and dashboards that even work across two RTC repositories. And in RTC 2.0 you can now use the ClearCase scm with RTC work items so that a ClearCase change set can be linked to an RTC work item (via CCRC in ClearCase). This allows one to introduce RTC into an existing ClearCase deployment or into a company using Subversion as well since we also have an scm bridge to subversion in RTC. This way you can manage all work items, planning, builds and reporting in RTC but use your choice of scm underneath. RTC is unique to other systems in that way. Some agile planing tools support multiple scm's but they are not linked to execution of the actual work and project status the way that RTC is.

I know this questions isn't the youngest, but it's still interesting. ;-)

I don't know a comparsion of both tools provided by IBM, or something like a checklist, where you can go through several questions/topics to get the correct answer.

What I figured out is the following:

1.) If you are developing java code with more than one refactor per year - use RTC SCM, it's much more faster.
2.) In general, ClearCase provides several possibilities to achieve a target.
For example
- distributed development: RTC SCM can only be used as a central repository via http(s) access, ClearCase can be used as distributed repository via MultiSite or as central repository via http(s).
- SCM workflow: You can only use the RTC workflow with repository workspace and sandboxes, which is related to UCM, ClearCase provides UCM, a simple /main/LATEST workflow or self-defined workflows with their own branching strategy.
- repository sizing/distribution: RTC provides one repository for each application server, ClearCase doesn't has such a limitation. This isn't relevant for the end-user, but there are aspects like backup, access control, splitting projects ...
And many other aspects.

We have a site with around 1.500 developers, ca. 200 using RTC, the other ones ClearCase.
The "RTC SCM" project can also be served via CC, but the performance with the refactor doesn't make it usable.
We have some development consortia with no direct network access to each other, so CC is the solution, RTC SCM would be impossible for those projects.
Small projects are using CC with a /main/LATEST workflow, they would call a strike, if they would have to use the RTC SCM workflow.
...

So there are a lot of points to watch for. ;-)

greetings georg.

Georg, actually you can also use distributed SCM in RTC:
https://jazz.net/library/article/535/

There is also this article comparing UCM and RTC