Clearvision allows Teranet to slash code development costs The developer of one of the world s most advanced land registration systems cuts coding costs significantly while improving efficiency. Executive summary CLIENT INDUSTRY Teranet State/Provincial Government Registry Systems LOCATION Canada SOLUTION Integrated Gerrit/ Git and JIRA deployment, ClearCase/ClearQuest migration and end-user Training/Transition planning and delivery CHALLENGE An outdated, unwieldy source code version management system and manual code review process creating delays in the development process. Developer productivity and efficiency were being affected. Git expertise was needed for a move to a better option. SOLUTION Adoption of Open Source Git DVCS and Gerrit Code Review tools Clearvision guidance and consultancy Use of Clearvision s CMBridge tool to support the ClearCase to Git migration process Clearvision Git, Gerrit and JIRA training support RESULTS Code revisions can now be reviewed on screen instead of needing a manual process. Creating a local source code snapshot view/clone has gone down from 45 minutes to less than five. Support and maintenance costs have been reduced by an order of magnitude. PAGE 1 - CLEARVISION CASE STUDY, TERANET COPYRIGHT CLEARVISION-CM 2016
About Teranet Teranet is an international leader and pioneer in electronic land registration systems and commerce. In Ontario, Teranet is the exclusive provider of online property search and registration. Teranet developed, owns and operates the Ontario Electronic Land Registration System, enabling customers to perform searches, transfer title documents through our search and registration capabilities, and perform many other functions in what is widely recognized as one of the world s most advanced, secure, and sophisticated land registry systems. Teranet develops business-to-government (B2G) and business-tobusiness (B2B) e-service solutions that enable organizations to greatly enhance the services they provide to their customers. With a unique combination of capabilities and state-of-the-art systems, Teranet is at the forefront of delivering service potential in the land, legal, and financial services industries as well as enabling electronic government service delivery organizations make their data more accessible and ultimately of more value to them and their stakeholders. The challenge Teranet, which owns and operates The Property Registry (TPR) in Manitoba as well as Ontario s Electronic Land Registration System (ELRS), relies heavily on the skills of almost 100 code developers. Essential to its success is the work of a software development lifecycle tools team, which is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure that supports product development in the company. This historically included an IBM Rational ClearCase software configuration management solution for source code version control, workspace management, parallel development support and build auditing. In 2010, however, the system was failing to live up to expectations. What we found was that ClearCase was very maintenance intensive, says Steve Brackenbury, Senior Systems Architect at Teranet. The development tools support team was spending an awful lot of time answering questions and patching. It was consuming a lot of time and if we didn t keep the environment patched then IBM wasn t willing to provide us with support. In addition, the ClearCase toolset was quite outdated, with a Windows based interface, and could not be integrated with more modern tools that Teranet wanted to adopt. It was a prehistoric product and we wanted something that would fit in nicely with the other tools we were using, Brackenbury comments. COPYRIGHT CLEARVISION-CM 2016 CLEARVISION CASE STUDY, TERANET - PAGE 2
We needed to know that we had a good, solid plan that would work. This is where Clearvision really excelled. - Steve Brackenbury, Senior Systems Architect The solution Teranet considered moving off ClearCase for a number of years, and researched a number of other systems. We looked at Subversion and some other commercial source code management products, but they came with a whole suite of additional tools we didn t need and were quite expensive, recalls Brackenbury. They didn t really fit well with our long-term goal of having something that was simple to use, inexpensive to support and that had a good knowledge base so we wouldn t have to hire consultants when we wanted to make a configuration change. Among the tools Teranet decided to try out were two free Open Source tools: Git, a popular and widely used distributed source code revision control and management system originally developed by Linus Torvalds to manage the Linux kernel and Gerrit, a web based Git repository access management and code review tool developed for and used by the Google Android project. After using, and liking, the tools during a six month trial period in 2011, the development team piloting the tools asked the company management to formally introduce them for use across the organization. Although they had selected a set of replacement tools for ClearCase and Clearquest, Teranet faced the daunting task of migrating their development teams and the associated in-flight projects to those new tools. To help them, they sought an experienced partner and picked Clearvision because of their experience and expertise. As a Git migration expert, with specific expertise in migrating from legacy tools like ClearCase, Clearvision was the obvious choice for a partner. Clearvision provides a comprehensive Git migration service that: Saves time and avoids disruptions, since Clearvision deals with the technical complexity and delivers a successful migration with minimal interruption to development teams. Is tailored to client needs, with a scalable process matched to customer migration requirements and complete knowledge transfer to allow clients to become rapidly self-sufficient. PAGE 3 - CLEARVISION CASE STUDY, TERANET COPYRIGHT CLEARVISION-CM 2016
Is safe and effective, since Clearvision has helped many organizations worldwide migrate to Git, all following a best-practice migration approach. What we liked about Clearvision was that it was a small shop with a ClearCase background, so they knew the products well and could guide us on how to do this migration, Brackenbury says. At the time there wasn t a well known path. We needed to know that we had a good, solid plan that would work. This is where Clearvision really excelled. Now and the future Clearvision now supports Teranet on a variety of tools, including Git and the Atlassian suite. Still using ClearCase, Subversion or Perforce? Give Git a go. It s a big shift but Clearvision are here to help at every step. Teranet is just one example of the large organisations Clearvision has migrated from a legacy tool to the open source successor Git. Find out more about the services available to you. Migrating to Git > COPYRIGHT CLEARVISION-CM 2016 CLEARVISION CASE STUDY, TERANET - PAGE 4