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Several years ago, one of my customers deployed Rational ClearCase across the company. Every employee and consultant, me included, was signed up for a week-long

Several years ago, one of my customers deployed Rational ClearCase across the company. Every employee and consultant, me included, was signed up for a week-long course on how to use the "Rational Unified Process" and other nonsense like that. By day 2, it was clear that they were selling us snake oil, but my customer was paying for my time, so I sit through it to the end. A few engineers in the room were genuinely hooked up by the promise of generating 90% of the code from UML, integration streams, automatic "un-branching" and all that. I wonder what they spent overall in licensing fees, training and lost productivity? And that's probably a fraction of the long-term damage dealt by this absurd process to a large C++ codebase. Somewhere, I should still have a "degree" issued by Rational University :-)

donaldihunter 3y ago
Yeah, that's mostly nothing to do with ClearCase tho. Raw ClearCase was just a VCS. It was Unified Change Management (UCM) that brought in the Rational Unified Process garbage.
jerf 3y ago
Wow. Circa 1999 my software engineering class, the college class that has the distinction of being the only class I've ever taken that I'm pretty sure I now disagree with literally everything that was taught in it, had us using that software suite to try to do that. I recall it made a very uncompelling case, on the grounds that it was putatively the future of software engineering, and you could hardly right-click on anything without the stupid thing hard crashing. Pro-tip: If your software is the future of software engineering, an engineering student using your software to do exactly what it was designed to do should not be able to crash it in under two minutes. And then keep crashing it. But even when it was working, it was literally virtually impossible to so much as contort a student assignment into that model. I can't imagine working somewhere that insisted on building production software that way, and I'm shocked they're still finding enough chumps to stay in business with that complete and utter trip pipe dream. (In a nutshell, the primary problem with such systems is that they do not account for the fact that every entity in a diagram is a cost. Every entity in a diagram needs to carry a value in excess of that cost, preferably comfortably so. Any methodology that insists on a totalizing view of the world in which everything must be in a diagram will produce diagrams so cognitively expensive that they are just a blurred mass of diagram entities no easier to understand than the underlying code. The people pushing these systems build nice little demo diagrams with 10-15 entities in them that are easy to understand, and then incorrectly attribute the ease of understanding to the fact that it is a diagram, rather than the fact the diagram only contains a handful of entities! Then they build systems based on the utterly incorrect belief that all diagrams are simple. The results are entirely predictable when you see it from this point of view. The part that's mindblowing is just how hard some people need to be beaten over their skull with the fact that diagrams aren't necessarily simple once they've ingested this idea, no matter how many hundreds of insanely complicated diagrams they stare at over the years....)

donaldihunter 3y ago

Yeah, that's mostly nothing to do with ClearCase tho. Raw ClearCase was just a VCS. It was Unified Change Management (UCM) that brought in the Rational Unified Process garbage.

jerf 3y ago

Wow. Circa 1999 my software engineering class, the college class that has the distinction of being the only class I've ever taken that I'm pretty sure I now disagree with literally everything that was taught in it, had us using that software suite to try to do that. I recall it made a very uncompelling case, on the grounds that it was putatively the future of software engineering, and you could hardly right-click on anything without the stupid thing hard crashing. Pro-tip: If your software is the future of software engineering, an engineering student using your software to do exactly what it was designed to do should not be able to crash it in under two minutes. And then keep crashing it. But even when it was working, it was literally virtually impossible to so much as contort a student assignment into that model. I can't imagine working somewhere that insisted on building production software that way, and I'm shocked they're still finding enough chumps to stay in business with that complete and utter trip pipe dream. (In a nutshell, the primary problem with such systems is that they do not account for the fact that every entity in a diagram is a cost. Every entity in a diagram needs to carry a value in excess of that cost, preferably comfortably so. Any methodology that insists on a totalizing view of the world in which everything must be in a diagram will produce diagrams so cognitively expensive that they are just a blurred mass of diagram entities no easier to understand than the underlying code. The people pushing these systems build nice little demo diagrams with 10-15 entities in them that are easy to understand, and then incorrectly attribute the ease of understanding to the fact that it is a diagram, rather than the fact the diagram only contains a handful of entities! Then they build systems based on the utterly incorrect belief that all diagrams are simple. The results are entirely predictable when you see it from this point of view. The part that's mindblowing is just how hard some people need to be beaten over their skull with the fact that diagrams aren't necessarily simple once they've ingested this idea, no matter how many hundreds of insanely complicated diagrams they stare at over the years....)