Which versions modified a particular function in ClearCase?

Question: How do I know which ClearCase versions modified a particular function or code line?

Answer: Over the years we have seen ClearCase users who were trying to find this out in many different ways: manual trial & error on the Version Tree diagram; binary search on the Version tree and many others.

All of them are not intuitive, require lots of attention and energy, and very frustrated.

More than that, when you have lots of history inside ClearCase, it means that it could take a few minutes until the Version Tree chart is loaded, and you finally get a spaghetti diagram you can’t really read.

So recently we’ve decided to get into the challenge and solve this problem once and forever.

We are now shipping a new utility called the “Get Real Version”, which simply receives a filename and a line number (as parameters) and efficiently retrieves useful information, such as where this line was REALLY changed (for the first time); by whom; when, etc.

This tool implements a clever algorithm we have created, which tracks the ClearCase Version Tree and determines the most efficient way to get this real version.

This helps you to better understand your code, especially a legacy code that may have been made years ago. You can easily compare the current version with the real version and get the correlation to other part in code. This helps you to resolve bugs and maintain code much more efficiently.

This solution is now offered as a command-line utility for Windows or as part of our extension for Visual Studio and ClearCase.

To download the command-line utility, click here.

To download the extension for Visual Studio and ClearCase, click here.