Goal
Our vision for GxTend.
Although GeneXus is known for its high level of productivity, projects based on it face similar challenges in the SCM (Software Configuration Management) area as those not carried out using GeneXus.
Having many projects, many versions of our product's code, many code environments to deal with and several developers working around the same set of source code inevitably increases the maintenance costs, both in terms of time an money, that our company need to dedicate to keep control on our software assets.
Not to mention the fact that performing such maintenance activities manually would leave us with weak processes, vulnerable to human errors.
Maturity in the software development process can be achieved without a specific tool, by only establishing custom working methodologies. However, this approach ends up turning aside more hours for manual administrative tasks that are error prone and little rewarding to the team.
Consequently, without a suitable tool, project managers should look for trade-offs to reduce these manual administrative tasks at the cost of loosing control. The underlying risk of this approach is to define methodologies that do not address every concern, and thus drives the organization into having a lower quality development process.
With this scenario in mind, our vision for GxTend is to provide a product that:
- Provide a single point to centrally administer all our company's source code not only from the point of view of where versions and change history is stored but also to provide a one-point to administer who has access to the company's software assets.
- Keep track and detailed information of all activities performed on our source code.
- Free developers from manual and error prone administrative tasks.
- Bring a coherent and more complete view of the project across time and across KBs.
- Provide an automated and audited path for changes to flow among the several source code environments.
- Increase maturity and quality of our deliverables by providing users with tools to enrich its changes of code with the chance to link each to a ticket that can eventually contain the complete history (the wheres and whys) for such change.
The final goal of GxTend is to be a product that not only lowers the costs of SCM but also provides a path that eliminates as much manual, prone to error, activities as possible and therefore increases the quality of our client's production.
