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ClearCase User, Do You Want to Save Time?

November 20, 2012 ¬ 12:19 pmh.Tamir Gefen

Do you want to save time?
Learn how Visual Annotate can help you save time

Let’s assume you’re a software engineer, and you have to find a bug that comes from a code section written by you or one of your colleagues, to fix it and deliver it as soon as possible (the application is in production, and the customer is waiting…)

When you look at the code, you suspect that the bug comes from a certain code section, and you first want to figure out where this bug came from—in which version it was inserted and when. Assuming that the suspected code is on line no. 62 in “backgroundtask.java” file, how do you find the information you need?

Well, you can use tools like “ClearCase Version Tree”, but could you find the information you need rapidly and conveniently?

The answer is probably not, as you have to check each file version separately, compare it with your current version, scroll down to line no. 62 and then carefully check whether the code line has been changed in the version you’re currently comparing to. Undoubtedly it would be exhausting… (that is a needle in haystack!)

So how can you rapidly find the exact information you need?

If you use Visual Annotate, you can find it within seconds! For each code line, you can easily find which version it came from (checked-in), when and by whom. This is how you can save time conveniently!

Figure 2: See line no. 62 – you can see it was inserted in version \BankDev_1.0_Integration\2 on 11/14/2012 (click to enlarge)

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Purchase 3 node-locked or 3 floating licenses and get an extra one (of the same kind) for free!

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Furthermore, there are another 4 great benefits when you use Visual Annotate:

You can color the code lines separately, to find the differences even more rapidly. You can set the different colors by version, usernames and dates.
You can easily jump to a certain code line by clicking on “Go to…” button (think what happens if you want to see details of line no. 2162 …)
You can see more information for each code line, including labels and baselines, source and target versions (very useful in merge situations), activity and comments.
Embedded ‘diff’ and track changes – see them in one dashboard for a better root cause analysis.

Figure 3: See the code of the current version (version 4) in the middle, annotated information on the left side and the differences from version 1 on the right side (click to enlarge)

What’s next?

Download 10-days trial version (installation takes only 1 minute)