langbein@cg-atla.agfa.com (Don Langbein) (06/15/90)
Does anyone have any first-hand experience with the Sun NSE product that they would be willing to share? And is anyone aware of published articles on this topic? We are looking at using NSE here, and I have read a lot of the Sun writing about it. The Sun writing is fine, but I wonder if there are problems and issues which are not apparent. Any comments at all would be quite welcome, but some points I am particularly curious about are: 1. What kind of effort is required to move to NSE from sccs? I am thinking of both individual programmer effort and system setup effort. We currently have a group of twenty or so developers with individual Sun workstations who use sccs through some home-grown shells. 2. Does NSE require a lot of effort to administer on an ongoing basis? 3. Is anyone using the link service to implement requirements traceability? If so, how is it working? Are there other applications of the link service which have proved useful? 4. How do the provisions for detecting and reconciling conflicting edits to the same source work out in practice? (In the Sun writing the scheme looks really slick and clean. I wonder what the actual experience with it is.) 5. I know this is somewhat subjective, but: do people find that either productivity or software quality is improved by introducing NSE into an environment in which there were formerly no tools beyond basic SunPro tools. I will be glad to email a summary of the responses I get to interested individuals. If I get a great many requests for emailed summaries -- more than twenty, say -- I will post to the comp.software-eng instead. -- Don Langbein, Agfa Compugraphic Div; Wilmington, MA 01887. (508) 658-0200, x7109{uunet!samsung,decvax, ulowell}!cg-atla!langbein