Codice announced Plastic SCM, a cross-platform software configuration management solution that streamlines how software applications are assembled. Application development teams use Plastic SCM to manage parallel development, where multiple developers work on building software at once, even from geographically dispersed locations.

Companies around the world have already selected Plastic SCM for use by their development teams, as the product can be used on multiple platforms—including Windows, Linux and MacOS operating systems—is faster than other software configuration solutions, and offers a user interface that is attractive and transparent to developers.

“The two biggest challenges for SCM systems are enabling highly parallel distributed development, and making the state of projects visible to both developers and management,” said Joe Niski, senior analyst at Burton Group. “Many products support distributed teams, but only a few provide useful visualizations of a project's code base. By taking a task-centric approach to version control, products like Plastic SCM facilitate fast-paced development lifecycles; by including graphical views of changes, they provide value to managers as well as developers.”

Plastic SCM provides advanced software configuration and version control functionality. The aim of Codice Software is to provide this advanced functionality in a flexible and cost effective way that can be used by companies of all sizes. Accordingly, Plastic SCM includes many features developers have come to rely on, including merge tracking, true renaming and several visualization tools.

“We built Plastic SCM from the ground up to be the mission-critical replacement for other software configuration options, many of which are open source projects,” said Pablo Santos, chief executive officer at Codice Software. “We have made Plastic SCM with an easy-to-use interface, in a way that is massively scalable and can integrate with a wide variety of development environments.”

Building the Best Software Configuration Management Tool

• Plastic SCM addresses many concerns of existing software configuration management tools:
• Plastic SCM provides an easy way to implement two key software development productivity concepts: task oriented and parallel software development. The Plastic branching system allows new parallel development lines to be created with just a simple click, and both the 3D version tree and new branch explorer ease visualization and comprehension of the development process.
• Plastic SCM manages thousands of branches through a streamlined user interface. Plastic SCM developers face no restriction in terms of the number of branches they can manage. Plastic SCM’s user interface makes this management painless.
• Plastic SCM provides reliability and scalability, as it can work with one of three standard back-end databases. The product is installed using the open source Firebird database. For larger development teams (more than a dozen developers), Plastic SCM can be integrated with the SQL Server or MySQL databases.

Becoming a Part of the Application Development Lifecycle
Plastic SCM is among the most flexible software configuration management solutions on the market. That flexibility enables development teams to incorporate the solution into their development processes. It can be used by Java, Microsoft and any other language based developers, and it works with various integrated development environments including Visual Studio and Eclipse. The product also works with many popular application development tools, such as Visual Studio, Eclipse and Oracle JDeveloper. Developers using many other tools in any environment can install Plastic SCM and witness rapid return on their investment.

Recognizing that many of its customers will select Plastic SCM as a replacement for CVS, Visual SourceSafe or Subversion, Plastic SCM includes functionality to import branches and related data from these tools.

Plastic SCM wraps an effective revision management engine around its versioning functionality. It allows a manager to assign a task and attach it to a branch of a given project. Then at the end of the project the manager can review what revisions were made. Plastic SCM can create visual reports related to the revision information as well.