How to generate Pentaho documentation? - pentaho

Our organization has used Pentaho for data integration purposes for over a decade. Due to organizational changes earlier this year, our team should take responsibility for data integration going forward.
The problem is, our team has nearly zero experience with Pentaho and use Frends for data integration. We want to move everything out of Pentaho to Frends. But alas, Pentaho seems to be a fairly challenging customer.
Problem 1: There's a lot and I mean A LOT of shit in Pentaho. The depth of some jobs is quite staggering, at least by our standards.
Problem 2: There is zero external documentation.
Problem 3: There is almost zero documentation within the jobs.
Problem 4: Pentaho is slow. Switching between open tabs easily takes 10 seconds. Opening a new tab 20 seconds, closing a tab 10 seconds.
Problem 5: A job within a job may be named as ABC, but when you open ABC, it is actually named as DEF. Combine this with Problem 4 and trying to keep up where you are, and where you were is hard.
At first I tried to document relevant jobs into our wiki using a tabular structure. But it quickly became a mess that was nearly impossible to navigate. Considering the outcome, spending any more time to manually document Pentaho seems stupid.
Is there a way to generate (hopefully readable) documentation automatically? I googled for answers and found this page. But considering the zero experience with Pentaho, I do not know if that page describes what I am looking for, and the instructions are written in rather broad strokes I have no idea how to apply in practice.
Thank you in advance.


Re your problem 4: there's no reason for Pentaho to take that long opening or switching tabs. Unless you're running it on particularly slow VMs with little memory, it shouldn't take that long. It's not the quickest gui out there, but it should be fast enough to allow working.
The only documentation tool I know of is the one you mention on your post. But as far as I know it's quite old and I don't know how well it'll work for your version. Give it a try, and see how it goes.
Other than that, if there's no doco available, you have litle recourse other than going through the various jobs and sub-jobs, transformations and sub-transformations and reverse engineer them.

Related

Using Gantt charts to track progress when working alone / with others

I wonder if anybody here uses gantt charts to track / improve own progress when working in a programming project alone or with others and what is the approach you use and which software

Gantt charts can still be useful even when working solo, since they show the critical path and easily update with new completion dates if and when things blow out (or, in those rare occasions, complete early).
Having said that, I don't usually use the charts very often any more. They're a nice picture for upper management levels but, when working alone, I just have the expected times for each task along with the expected dates (in textual format).
I find it hard to justify using an incredibly powerful project management tool when I can get the same information from a simple spreadsheet (with a lot less effort).
When you're managing a team with tasks allocated to a larger number of people then, yes, I still find the charts indispensable. But part of the reason for that is that they have to go up to higher management levels (the kind who can't understand what's going on without a pretty picture).

I use the Gantt diagram on the redmine forge: you insert tickets with deadlines and it generates the Gantt diagram.
You can also show only open tickets, closed tickets, etc.

SAP Business Objects

I have been offered by my employer to work on SAP Business Objects to analyse large amount of data they have.
I have the following doubts before I could accept that:
a. I love programming and do not want to lose touch with it. Do you think working on this tool would excite a person who loves building software? Or Is it like most part of the tool configurable through Wizard like interface?
b. Is this tool capable of working on data collected for research and testing purpose?
I tried googling but all I could get is some videos which mentions "Business Intelligence" more than 12 times a minute. Any suggestion or even links to help me make the preliminary analysis would be helpful. Thanks...

Business Objects is not rocket science. A competent developer should be able to figure out how to build a universe in a few days. My first experience took me about two days to figure out how to build a universe and another two days or so to get some analytic reports out of it.
However, 'research data' suggests that the actual structure of the data will vary depending on the nature of the survey so you will probably find yourself constantly making ad-hoc changes or new bespoke universes for each job. Business Objects is probably a reasonably flexible way to do this (a custom universe for a tabular set of research data could probably be set up in a few hours). However, the job would basically devolve to a reporting analyst position.
If you're not a 'tools guy' by nature you will probably find this sort of work unsatisfying. I do full life-cycle work on data warehouse systems and from time to time this involves developing front ends using Business Objects. I'm quite happy to work with it casually as part of a larger job but I wouldn't want a job solely working with just one reporting tool.
If you think of yourself as a programmer I would recommend against accepting the job if it was limited to just working with Business Objects.

I have experience working with Designer and reporting in Business Objects... Honestly, it's quite easy. I have to say I'm a total programmer at heart, and absolutely hate working with it, but that's what possessed me to write a program that uses the DLL's to automate everything. I enjoyed automating it, and ended up making a program that did in about 5 minutes what it previously took me weeks to do. Now all the BO developers use it, and I mostly spend my time updating that.
In summary... It sucks to work with when it's +60% of your job, but you don't have to lose out on Programming. If anything, I think I've improved my programming. Now I barely do the crappy side of the work. I just run my program, and everything works out.
I'm not sure what you are asking in question "B".

Microsoft RAP (Risk Assessment Program)

Do you think Microsoft's RAP program worth the money you pay ?
Any suggestions ?
Thanks

I would have to say that it depends on a number of factors. First how knowledgeable are you at configuring and maintaining the specific versions of SQL Server that they would be looking at? Then why are you doing the SQL RAP? Is it to really get a good risk assessment, to demonstrate to management that things are being done correctly, or to learn where you are coming up short in an effort to correct things and find areas to learn more about the product, or is it none of the above?
I had a SQL RAP done at the end of last year, and I can tell you from personal experience, you will only get as much from it as you are open to learning. If you have a cluster, be prepared to have your eyes opened to areas you never thought to look at. The SQL RAP visit has four different phases, or at least mine did. First they collect the data from your SQL Servers using pssdiag and a bunch of other neat tools that they leave copies of most with you. Then they go into analysis, where they take the data and perform a very thorough analysis of it and generate reports and recommendations. Then they sit down with you and management if you so chose and go over everything, what was good, what was iffy, and what was bad. Then the last part they sit down with you as a DBA and teach you how to use the tools they used and that they can leave copies of with you. They go over the PAL Tool, SQL Nexus, and some others and make sure that you know how to use these tools to do self analysis. Best of all, they leave you these really detailed reports that you can use as a self check for setting up new environments in the future.
Is it worth it? You probably can't tell that until you are done with it. For me, I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about running a "Best Practice" implementation of SQL Server, and who'd like some one on one learning time with a Senior Microsoft Field Engineer.

Oh boy, is that all they does with this much hyped RAP.
Pssdiag is already done.
We did the PAL and Nexus and they too did it before.
They took around 20 Gigs of size trace files to analyse.
Now, wanted to do RAP. Holy cRAP, if this is the same thing to do again, what that's for.
I expect much more than this level of analysis without which I think this is useless and waste of money.

I've been a part of 2 RAPs for SharePoint (finished my second 2 weeks ago). I am unsure as to how much it costs (the company I work for gets 3 RAPs a year with MS) but it is most definitely worth it.
Starting 2010, the PFE will leave the RAP tool installed on the data collection machine. This means that for up to a year, you can rerun the full RAP as many times as you want and analyze the results.
The RAP tool (for SharePoint) runs a bunch of tests that are categorized as below:
SQL Configuration (24)
Server Health (4)
Server Configuration (7)
MOSS Configuration (2)
Each test produces a list of issues with detailed recommendations on how to resolve them.
Additionally, a competent PFE (and they are) will help troubleshoot any outstanding issues you have in your environment and give you the opportunity to listen and learn.
I would recommend the MS RAP to all SharePoint (and SQL) Admins.

If you have never had one, then I think you will have benefit from going through it at least one time. I warn you that it can be quite humbling.

Your Daily Schedule

I try to devote certain time everyday to learn new skills while also improve the older skills that I've gained. But, I'm not hitting the sweet spot where I learn what I want and get things done.
So, I was just curious to know how you guys spend time everyday and "hit the spot".

I use Google reader and just add more and more tech blogs as I find them. Then, I read them in the morning with coffee. This site provides quite a bit of education as well.

I read technical websites everyday. I like to use Google reader as well since it tracks what I've read and allows me to easily continue where I left off from any computer I happen to have access to.
I started out with the basics : Slashdot, Ars Technica
, and Dr. Dobb's Journal. These sites will frequently lead to other great sources of information.
When following sites like this using an RSS feed, you don't have to read every article that comes through. Just scan them over and read the ones that catch your interest. Without realizing it, you will store away alot of information that will pop back into your head when you encounter a situation that triggers it.
You won't necessarily be a master of everything you read but you will be at least aware of current developments and technologies.
The second part is to practice. I usually have some simple and enjoyable programming project on the go at home all the time. I may not actually complete anything useful but I use it as a basis to try out new things. Alot of times I will encounter a problem at work and find that I've already explored some of the solutions at home or at least thought about them and will be able to make a much more informed decision.

Tech blogs are a great way to find out basic information on new material and sometimes they will even have a more in-depth feature that can leave you with some take-away knowledge than just another tech headline.
What works best for me is to identify topics that I have read in tech blogs that interest me and then find sources that provide me with more advanced information on the subject. Then as the week goes by spend however much time needed to digest the information learning the material.
Just browsing tech headlines all day, in my opinion, won't leave you with any distilled information beyond basic advances in technology. Actually diving in and spending X amount of time each day learning material that is interesting to you will be infinitely better.

I find the key to getting things done is to manage distrations. I process email in batches only once or twice per day, and try to avoid phone calls, meetings and IM where I can. This leaves me bigger chinks of time available for development.
I learn new skills in a couple of different ways... Firstly reading a load of developmetn related tech blogs via an RSS reader. This allows me to absorb a continuous flow of new ideas without necessarily "learning" a lot, but saves me a lot of time on research later. Then when I run into something new, chances are something I've already read will be of assistance and I can dig in an "learn" something in more detail.
e.g. Through regular RSS reading I became aware that a significant number of javascript frameworks had been developed and it seemed to make more sense to use a js framework than coding DOM manipulation by hand. Later when I started a new project that was going to be heavy on Ajax, I was able to name a couple of frameworks off the top of my head,quickly pick one and really dig in and get to know it.

Accurev SCM [closed]

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Does anyone use Accurev for Source Control Management? We are switching (eventually) from StarTeam to Accurev.
My initial impression is that the GUI tool is severely lacking, however the underlying engine, and the branches as streams concept is incredible.
The biggest difficulty we are facing is assessing our own DIY tools that interfaced with starteam, and either replacing them with DIY new tools, or finding and purchasing appropriate replacements.
Additionally, is anyone using the AccuWork component for Issue management? Starteam had a very nice change request system, and AccuWork does not come close to matching it. We are evaluating either using Accuwork, or buying a 3rd party package such as JIRA.
Opinions?

Sweet mother of god is Accurev awful. 300k lines of code? Try it with millions, with hundreds of developers working on scores of projects.
Continuous integration? Sure, that's something that developers can approximate by doing regular merges in, say, perforce, git, mercurial, or any of the countless other tools that actually gets the work done, but it becomes the choice of the developer as to how to proceed. For architects, leads, build engineers, or anyone who actually uses source control to slice and dice, Accurev is horrific.
I went to an "Advanced Accurev topics" talk, and the first tidbit was a large shell command for clearing out Accurev's client-side caching/sync mechanism to correct for when Accurev updates silently fail to pull down files that should be updated.
A Timestamp Optimization checkbox? Deep overlaps? Modal dialogs with only one background process? (That would be okay if those processes were anything other than glacial.) Cascading graphs of selectively configured streams put in place just to be able to pull off components and cross-merging? Updates aren't actually atomic without time-locking?! (honest answer: update again)
Every time I try and do anything serious in Accurev, I feel like I'm playing Russian Roulette at a table with HAL9000, Skynet, and a Speak & Spell. On the line? Four more hours of my life.
Why am I here, griping about Accurev? Because my other machine has taken a full four hours to try to update 10MB of files over VPN. Why? Because some other change has come up stranded and requires some sort of catastrophic resync scan for elements. The worst part? All of these files were on a workspace on the same computer. We're talking about several hours just to get a recently updated workspace to the point where I can put the right notches in the stream history.
One word Accurev review: Avoid

Honestly, I feel like I need to double check to see if I'm using the same tool as these folks that seem to like Accurev. I used Subversion in my previous job and liked it a lot. We never had any issues with it to speak of, and of course the price is right. My biggest problem with Accurev is that it seems they felt the need to be different for different's sake. It uses a completely different vocabulary to express versioning concepts, that even after using it for almost 6 months, feels very foreign to me. It has no fewer than 8 or 9 states any given file can be in, compared to about around 1/2 as many for Subversion. The GUI is crappy and slow, and the IDE integration plugins are sub-par. I had assumed that at some point I would "get" Accurev and see why it's so much better, but that has yet to happen. My advice is to stay away.

I have used AccuRev for nine months and I anxiously await the day I use it no more. My one line review is:
It's like source control written by developers who have read about it in a
book, but have never actually used it before.
Basic concepts are missing or extremely complicated. Example, I've just lost 8 hours work because there's no good way to "revert" a change once it's in a stream. You can "purge" that transaction - but thats it its gone, you can't then cherry pick the changes you really wanted.
The GUI is slow, bloated and inconsistent. Warnings are cryptic eg "error merging element id 1234556". Every single dialog box is modal. As one poster said, there are 9 states a file can be in - but what's more, you must manually click through a list box of 9 options to see the setting for each file.
The streams model sounds like a good idea, but the default behavior of "inheriting" changes from a parent stream is actually incredibly bad in practice. Just say the word "Deep Overlap" to anyone who has really used AccuRev and watch them shudder, turn pale, and/or faint. Making the streams is very easy, but actually merging them with any meaningful differences is arcane and non-deterministic.
No one has mentioned this, but the whole system of "include/exclude" rules to manage file and directory filters is completely broken. This system lives outside the transaction system so there's no way to revert, track history or reproduce changes to a live source stream - for example when Johnny Intern decides the "core" library isn't useful to the entire development team.
The only reason I can account for Accurev's popularity is that it is optimized for the "Demo to Management" case. We're using AccuRev for serious software development - dozens of projects and many more developers. The streams and the GUI look great but after a few weeks use varnish comes off revealing a old, busted, mechanical-turk like system.
Stay far away from Accurev - use Git or Mercurial if you want something modern and free, or Perforce if you want something rock solid, well-supported but expensive.
EDIT:
As a postscript here's one of the many examples of the lack of care and general shoddiness in the UI:
The default difference viewer has its numbering "off by one" - for example if you have 2 diffs in a file - the viewer shows diff "0 of 1" and diff "1 of 1". I mean, really, would you feel comfortable trusting your code to a system that exhibits such a stupid and easily fixable bug.

I worked on (and administrated) AccuRev for more than a year lately, and most of my impressions are very good.
We evaluated it alongside with "Plastic SCM", SVN and "ClearCase-UCM" (that we already owned and used), and decided to dump ClearCase and SVN (both were used in two different groups) and to purchase AccuRev.
First, the stream architecture is much more solid, easy and safe SCM method than the old branching architecture that all the other tools are tied to (yes even ClearCase's "streams" are eventually a wrapper of branches). There's a lot of articles about the differences in their site, you can search and read about it to make it understandable. (Try this link, and this one too)
The timesafe architecture - you can't delete anything from the depots (=repositories) database. I saw tools that this operation is possible with the proper admin permissions. In AccuRev you will use internal commands in order to change or fix a mistake you made, which in turn will be recorded as a new transaction also. Very smart very safe.
integrations! AccuRev integrates with so many tools (to give you ALM bundle) - bug tracking tools (like JIRA, ClearQuest), IDEs, testing tools (quality center), and if you can't find one you can write your own (they provide Java/Perl/XML/CLI SDKs)
Change Package, I don't know about you, but I can't stand SCM tools that doesn't supply change management (did anyone said SVN?), like ClearCase "activities", and AccuRev's "issues". It's a must for my opinion, and one of my CM "best practice". And they can be integrated with your bug tracking tool too, so your users can work on real tasks like features and defects.
the support is just amazing. As a former client of IBM (because of Rational ClearCase is now part of IBM), the shift to AccuRev was simply awesome. During the evaluation they gave numerous on-line support to understand how we want the tool to act for us, so we tweaked it together even before we payed a cent. And they kept that degree of responsiveness after that evaluation period too; We had some problem during an upgrade from 4.5.4 to 4.6, in just a couple of hours (while the upgrade is still in process) the support guy contacted me back, suggested a few tips, connected to my desktop and finally fixed the problem before any other company's support would even started to try to figure who you are. Of course that if you choose open source tool than you're on your own!
Also the tool comes with help system, which can be even too verbose sometimes. And don't forget the forums (especially on cmcrossroads) that are very good in supplying rapid answers too.
And there's so many more....
Of course there are also drawbacks (which software is perfect?) - I would like, for example, to see the file(s) <-> issue(s) association during check-in too, like in ClearCase, not just in "promotion" like it is today - but IMHO they are really minor.
So, as you can understand, if you read it all, I'm a big fan of AccuRev, and I'm highly recommending it. IMHO, it is today one of the best SCM tools you got the chance to work on; modern, wise, easy and strong.

My current client uses Accurev for SCM and after a few projects using a DVCS like Git or Mercurial, I can honestly say that using Accurev is about as enjoyable as closing your face in a car door.
The GUI for Mac and Linux is god awful slow. You can forget using the refactoring support in your IntelliJ or NetBeans IDE, if you use Accurev...that is unless you are going to write your own plugin.
Oh yea...let's not forget about this little chestnut ==> evil twin.
On a positive note, it could be worse...it could be Clearcase.

Accurev sucks! It's overcomplicated for the price of productivity of the team.
I've worked with several SCMs and the idea of accurev is great but not practical. It's Merge Hell with a hierarchy that looks good in the UI but is pain to deal with when it comes to real life.
Specially when you refactor your code (something that some people actually do everyonce in a while) and you get in a mess when a defunct file is not promote all the way up. Or even worse if somebody else overrides a defunct file and creates a new file with the same name....etc
The UI is incredible terrible. Which honestly doesn't matter how good you think the backend is. You will still use the UI (I use the VS plugin which is half decent except it freezes the IDE sometimes, nice huh!).
If you live in the 80's and are planing to use the command line for you day to day use, then i guess you can avoid the UI. If you have an integration build server then of course you have no choice but to use the command line (No native tasks for MSbuild/ANT/NANT that i know of). I just heard that they are doing some work with http://www.electric-cloud.com/. Don't know anything about it still.
Accurev is new therefore there has little resources available online as apposed to svn which you would find tons of integration work that was done by hundreds (with jira for example).
If you are a manager. Accurev will make you feel good looking at the streams, because it does look pretty as long as you dont have to deal with it..
If you are a developer, (a junior developer will not care much, he/she will do whatever you ask them to do)
If you are an architect, refactors a lot, re-addresses architecural descisions...etc you will find accurev as your worste enemy, moving stuff around is pain. Very anti-agile if you ask me. It's not fluid..
If you are a build engineer, you will find it PAIN to get all the developers into a procedure, which you will have to do if you use accurev (ex. promote their code to the agreed upon stream in preperation for a release)....
CRM is supposed to make things easier... I dont see Accurev at this point doing that.. It's still not mature enough, If you want to be a pioneer and strugle in the hope for things to get better..go for it..
Otherwise, don't re-invent the wheel and go with something more established with much more case studies and applications. Because to be practical, what accurev claims to offer that differs is not worth it when you deal with it's pains on a daily basis...

We've been using AccuRev for a few years now. It's a serious improvement over our last tool (Razor) and while I'd recommend it for others- it does have a few drawbacks.
Benefits:
The stream based interface is quite intuitive. I make snapshots every second week and have a number of ongoing development streams branching off the snapshot.
Moving changes between stream is really easy, just select the change, send it to the "change palette" and select the destination stream. It guides you through all the files that need to be merged.
The command-line utilities are great. We've managed to script most of our release generation around it.
Integrations for Visual Studio, Bugzilla, etc...
Drawbacks:
As monjardin pointed out, the client GUI can be slow. I use the windows version for all my history/stream searching since it's much faster than the X11 one. Of course, the GUI's written in Java so performance obviously wasn't their first concern.
It's starting to get slow for really large databases (I'm talking over 300,000 LOC), although they've apparently addressed it in today's release of 4.7.
We opted to go with the cheaper license and not get the change packages feature (I can't see them working that well anyways, as the entire idea of promoting individual changes flies in the face of continuous integration). So far it hasn't hurt us.
Overall, for the price you pay it's a nice tool. We evaluated ClearCase, MKS, Spectrum and Subversion during our trial period. Subversion may have been a good choice, but it was still pretty green when we were evaluating. I've never heard of Plastic before, but I regret not evaluating Perforce.
Also, I understand that the engineers over at Trolltech (makers of Qt) have recently switched to git. I'd be interested in checking that out as well.

We use AccuRev for 4 years already. I hate it very much, mostly because of its horrible GUI. Several years ago AccuRev sent a survey for their clients to fill and at the end of the survey there was a field with suggestions. I started collecting things which annoy me the most, and below you'll find what I have now. Unfortunately, it's full of AccuRev terminology, but I think you'll get the idea anyway.
Accurev GUI possible improvements
Working with history
When examining history, a developer most often wants to see diff to previous transaction/version. This should be as accessible as a double click. For example double-clicking on file in transaction log could open diff to previous version. Double-clicking on a file in Default Group filter could open diff to backed, double-clicking on a file in Modified search could open diff to most recent. That would save tons of time.
Common experience is that developers rarely open files for editing from within AccuRev. Rather they very often diff files, then revert or promote changes. So double click should not open files for editing, it should diff them instead. This may be an option in preferences, so different people may decide whether they want double click to diff files or open files.
It should be possible to select two transactions in stream or workspace history and perform a file diff between them.
Overlaps merging
Merging overlaps in a stream requires performing "Deep Overlap" search in a workspace that takes much more time than to search overlaps in specific stream. Then it is needed to sort overlaps by overlap stream and merge only those from specific stream. There should be more convenient way to perform merging overlaps in stream. For example ability to limit deep overlap search by specific stream and do not show overlaps in parent streams. Limiting Deep Overlap search by timelocked stream is not very useful if you are several streams under this timelocked stream or there is no timelock on parents at all.
Now there is a simplified way that involves creating change palettes, but it is still not convenient. Merge menu item should be available at stream level if there is a workspace under that stream that may be used for overlaps merge.
Annotate tool
Annotate tool is very awkward:
using slider at the top to browse different version resets position in the file that is VERY annoying for large files;
should be able to open history at the specific transaction directly from annotate tool. Now developer needs to remember transaction# and search for it in stream history (also need to search for the stream where transaction was made).
Stream Favorites
Context menu item "Add to stream filter" was removed when new stream favorites were introduced. It should be possible to right click on stream and add it to one of the stream favorites (2nd level context menu, or dialog may pop up). Now it is very annoying to edit stream favorites, particularly when you need to have 2 similar sets of streams.
Stream browser
It should be easy to copy stream name to clipboard. Now you need to open "Change stream" dialog for that. Ctrl+C in stream browser could copy the name of selected stream to clipboard.
There is no way to copy stream name from stream view. Right click on tab could copy stream name in clipboard, or show context menu with "copy stream name to clipboard" item in it.
Diff and merge tool
Shows only the first different character in line, not the whole line difference, does not highlight syntax. Luckily, diff tool may be easily switched to external tool, so this is minor.
Other suggestions
Option in preferences to enable Multiple columns sort mode by default.
It would be nice to save not only the latest keep/promote log, but at least 5-10 older ones.
File extension column in stream or workspace view with ability to sort on it would be great.
Reordering tabs would be nice.
Very small font in keep/promote/lock message under Windows, it's unreadable. Increase the font size or allow user to change it.
Implement more convenient way to locally ignore files, environment variable is not very useful (user may want to ignore different sets of files in different streams/depots).
For the last 3 years AccuRev added 3 things from this list (I removed them as they are already implemented):
Hardcoded (can't be customized) keyboard shortcuts for most actions
Made it possible to call diff for several files from transaction at once (before that one should have to right click on every file and call "Diff to previous version" from context menu.
Added search for text to Annotate tool. But because of the position reset when you try to switch to different version (see above) the Annotate tool is still unusable.
Besides GUI there are fundamental flaws in AccuRev in the whole:
Difficult to update backwards
You can't easily update backwards. There is accurev update -t <transaction-number> command, but if you updated to transaction 100, you can't update to transaction 95 using accurev update -t 95. In order to do that you need to set up time lock on your backed stream (which will introduce transaction in AccuRev) and update your workspace.
Deep Overlaps
When you update you may happen to have invalid state of sources without any notice. This is because Overlaps feature. Overlap is basically a conflict (when file is changed by both you and them). If you have overlap in your workspace, you'll need to merge it before you are allowed to update. But if you have overlap in the stream, under which you have your workspace, you won't have any notice about that, but overlapped file won't be updated in your workspace. Consider the following stream structure
[Depot Root] <- [Team stream] <- [Your stream] <- [Your workspace]
Let's say you changed foo.cpp and promoted it to [Your stream]. After that someone from your team changed both foo.h and foo.cpp, let's say added method to the class Foo, and promoted the files to [Team stream]. After you update your workspace, you'll get new version of foo.h (because you didn't change it), but you won't get foo.cpp because it's overlapped in [Your stream]. So, your update will go clean, but linker will complain about unresolved symbol Foo::NewMethod if you try to build after that.

I've been a long time Accurev user, and have recently moved to a job where I'm using Perforce. I gotta tell you, I wish I had Accurev back. I do agree - the UI is slow and has problems.
However there are some truly AWESOME visualization tools in there. I can't believe that anyone would look at the version history browser and not fall in love! The stream browser is a great simple tool to understand what is going on in your development organization.
Also, dirt simple to administer. Accurev is actually one of my favourite tools.

One of the best days I've ever had at my current job is they day we ditched Accurev and moved to Subversion. Accurev uses overly complicated concepts. Like one of the commenters above, after working with it for years, I still didn't understand the different states that artifacts could be in. It seems that Accurev's greatest asset is its whitepapers and stream visualization, both of which are v appealing to management but does nothing for developers. I use Subversion, Mercurial and Git for various projects and would recommend these tools over any other.

Accurev is anti-agile tool:
Main idea of Accurev is to use different streams for different teams, so, changes made by team1 won't affect team2.Sounds good, but in a real world we all know that at the end we have to merge the code from both teams and believe me it's nightmare in Accurev. The more changes both teams will do in their streams, the more time everybody will spend on merging at the end. It's the same if every team will do their development in the separate branch using SVN and trying to merge everything after 1 month of development....Basically Accurev creates late merge price and you are going to pay this price for ever if you will choose Accurev for more than 1 team.
In order to fix problem created by point 1 people decide to refuse from cross functional teams in favor of functional. They even provide argument to support this idea, like "knowledge expertise" principle. In other words when you don't have cross functional teams (and Agile as well) it's easier to have experts for particular part of the system, so they will perform code reviews better and act as "information/design/implementation experts". We all know that information expert is an anti-pattern not only in Agile, since it's better to spread the expertise in order to avoid knowledge bottlenecks in development.

Put me in the anti-Accurev camp. We moved to it recently, and it's been horrible. We have a number of quite large projects, and Accurev seems to be almost unusable for the quantity of files we have. Over a VPN, forget it. It takes forever to update, the cross-stream management doesn't work in any intuitive way, the UI is complex and slow.
Additionally, support for it in a number of tools we use is either non-existent or poorly implemented.
Add the various bugs that keep popping up, and I'd say we wasted a great deal of money for something that is done much better by open-source software, such as Subversion. We still use CVS for some projects, and even it is so much better for normal operations and workflow that I'd pick it over Accurev.

Another big thumbs down for Accurev. Every simple operation seems to become so horribly complex - cryptic error messages send you scattering to manual, only finding theoretical explanations about concepts that shouldn't have existed in the first place.
UI is so slow and unresponsive it makes you want to gouge your eyes out.
Stay away.

Accurev has some great concepts; but suffers from:
1) many many inconsistencies in the command-line interface.
2) many bugs and nuisances in the application/interface. E.g. their time-safe property is not actually time-safe at all because of several bugs that affect snapshots and pass-through streams.
3) major bugs in critically important features... As above; time-safe bugs; bugs in merging by issues.
3) they are a year behind where they should be, because they wasted a whole year on trying to move their backend to a database - this will be version 5 which may never see the light of day.
4) The marketing is excellent; but the product does not live up to the marketing hype
5) every release has had major critical bugs that has required them to release immediate hotfixes. This has been a major disruption for us. And these aren't minor bugs.
6) doesn't scale well... takes up a huge amount of disk space and gets slower over time
Having said all that; it's still a good product; but if I were to do it all again I'd consider git instead.

After 4 months, my very negative opinion hasn't changed at all. While Accurev has some very nice concepts, the slowness and complexity far outweigh the advantages, at least for us. Aside from the usual complaints about the GUI and the obscurity of a number of features, one of the absolutely most annoying faults is how many hoops you have to jump through just to update a workspace, made much worse by the inability to update only one directory (or directory tree).
A typical update consists of waiting a loooong time to be told you have overlaps. Of course, you aren't told what the overlaps are. So, you have to do an overlap search, wait another loooong time, resolve the overlaps, do another update, wait a looooong time, and hope it worked this time.
Some of our remote developers update as infrequently as possible because the update time over VPN is absurd. Granted, we have an enormous number of source files across a number of products, and if we reorganized everything we could probably improve performance.
However, we hired Accurev (at a significant cost) to come in and tell us how to set everything up. Still sucks. Aside from that, we really shouldn't have to reorganize the way we work with our sources to suit a source-code-control system. It's a tool, not a business model.
Lastly, we've been trying out an Accurev plugin for IntelliJ, written by Accurev. It works just as poorly as the rest, and, while Accurev has been very responsive about fixing the plugin, we aren't their QA group, nor did we sign up to be an alpha test site (yes, it's that buggy). We finally gave up and wrote our own plugin that actually works.

#Steveth
The Interface is lousy...However the streams model is very innovative.
Being able to create a stream for a new project off the trunk stream, and having 5 developers working on it, and not having any form of merge collisions when we merge that stream back into the main trunk is unheard of, yet it works well in Accurev.

At a previous employer we reviewed Accurev and Plastic SCM. At the end of the day, I was not impressed with Accurev's interface, or the so-called "streams". We went with Plastic, and nobody complained.
#Jonathan
The streams are interesting,but I don't see how any version control can magically avoid collisions when two people touch the same code in the same file. Accurev's model was intriguing, but at the end of the day, nice clean branching and merging with a drop dead easy interface made Plastic the choice for us. Plastic's timeline view (I forget the actual name), showing the branch/merge/check-in history made it very simple to review the history of the project from a bird's eye view.

Accurev is simply the worst tool I have ever used.
Subversion is very good, esp if you are migrating from cvs.

My company ha been using Accurev since early 2010, coming from StarTeam before that and CVS in the very distant past. I haven't used CVS (having been on a different team at the time) so I have no comparisons there, and I never bothered to learn StarTeam too intimately.
Since then I've also played with both the CLI and Tortoise versions of SVN, Git, and Mercurial (Hg) in my free time. I plan on giving Git a more thorough go at some point, but I found Hg to be much more intuitive and easy (at least under Windows). Anyway, like I said management saddled us with Accurev and after spending time to get fairly well acquainted with it (GUI and CLI both) as a developer... I absolutely hate it.
Someone earlier in the thread summed it up as software written by devs that had read about SCM in a book but never used it... I agree whole-heartedly but you also get the feeling that they had the same level of experience with GUIs, efficient processing, etc. (In fact, I see that Accurev has a new product called "Kando" based on Git...sounds like they've finally realized how bad their model is. But to quote a coworker "I wouldn't trust anything written by the same team at this point"... I have to wonder if it is a coincidence that there is a baby-wipe product named "Kandoo"...)
Ok, obviously I don't care for the product. If you've spent the time to read this thread, then obviously there are quite a few folks with similar views on it. But I wanted to share some of my own gripes that I've had with it over the last few years as well -- btw if it helps anyone, I think we were using v4.7 previously and have been on v5.3 (?) now for quite some time.
My biggest beef with Accurev is how horribly slow and inefficient it is. Notice I didn't use the word GUI -- I've tried both GUI and CLI-- the slow parts are on the server, so you're screwed either way. It seems like I see one of those damn modal dialog/status bars at every turn... I switch tabs -- bam!: processing, please wait. I reparent a stream -- oh wait just another minute. For "Updates" I expect it to be a little slow (although sometimes it gets annoying when it screams "Overlap" [aka a conflict] at me when I happen to have a file with IDENTICAL content to what it's pushing down). I change directories browsing to a path... processing, processing, "oh you want to go down one more sub-folder"... let me process that some more. You get the idea.
Is that my only beef? Hell no.
1) For the merge tool, I've had the "ignore white space" option checked for years, but I can only ever recall it working ONE time (for example, say we're talking about about comparing say 2 versions of a JSP where I converted spaces to tabs or trimmed some trailing white space or something). Why is this an issue? Because it becomes pure torture for every other developer that looks in the history and wants to see what REALLY changed. If they can't get implement this correctly, don't put the F***ING option there. (Note:using WinMerge as an external compare tool, with appropriate settings works fine)
2) I've had instances where checking a file into one stream and then needing to put an IDENTICAL copy of that same file into another stream (using the same issues #) causes it to throw a temper tantrum. If I use the wrong issue #, it goes in with no problem. This is probably an isolated case (and maybe due to other poor process decisions my company saddles us with) but I thought I'd mention it for completeness.
3) The history? All stored on the server. Translation: If you enjoyed waiting for it to switch tabs, create/reparent a workspace, and update then you're in for more of the same when you want to view history.
4) The way it's exclusionary rules are done is not only terrible but also pathetic. Under Windows, you actually have to create an environment variable where you can create some exclusions to files that you don't want to show up. IT DOES NOT SUPPORT REGEX. I've seen several other SCMs that offer much better approaches (I'm fond of the the ignore files used in Hg. I think there is something similar in Git too) -- not only are both regex and glob patterns supported, but defining this in a FILE is more system-friendly and much easier to edit that putting it into an Environment variable. Not only that, but it seems that the ignore filters are iffy at best. The way our projects are defined have the build folder under the project folder (which is source controlled) and trying to exclude all folders under the the build folder doesnt seem to work -- most of them still show up in my "External" filter even after setting up rules.
5) It's check-in process (a "Promote") also seems to run with the theme of slow and inefficient. We use an external ticket system (not AccuWork... our ticketing system has its flaws but after using AccuRev, I can't image that product to be much better). Anyway, when we say "Promote [this file]", first it pops up with another modal dialog (after the required waiting, while it does more stat processing), then it presents a list of ALL tickets it has pulled (there are a lot...too many to reliably find anything). Next, we must enter our ticket number from the other system, and wait some more while it takes forever to find a match (I thought it already pulled the list...geez). Finally, it will display the matches, then we pick one and tell it to promote using that ticket number. After yet some more waiting, we're finally done.
I could go on but I'll stop there.... this post is getting too long. Instead, let me sum up Accurev in my own way: After having to wait for all these slow annoying "Stat processing", etc dialogs during an issue where we were trying to quickly get a fix out, I came up with a new slogan for them: "AccuRev: when seconds count, your fix is only minutes away".
Since management won't get rid of Accurev (I know they won't go for anything without Enterprise support but I've begged for them to consider anything else: SmartGit...Kiln...Perforce...), I have been using TortoiseHg to locally version control my files (in addition to Accurev). It is a little more work. But for those saddled with Accurev, it makes life so much easier. You get: better diff management -- MUCH MUCH easier to see and review code changes after an "accurev update", the ability to view some history without waiting 10 years for the server, ability to share directly between you and another dev (assuming they also install it), ability to revert/restore your changes if you accidentally wipe something out while trying to get clear of Accurev's merge hell ("Overlapped" files), and even more if you can get the rest of your team using it.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, during a conversion with our build engineers I was told that while Accurev has a Java API that you can develop for, it apparently requires purchasing some sort of additional licensing. I can't confirm this since a) I can't find pricing anywhere on Accurev's website* and b) I doubt like hell they'd tell me at work...
*Kinda weird considering I can find some sort of rough pricing for Perforce, Kiln, StarTeam and SmartGit quite easily. I usually get a sketchy feeling when some product won't list any sort of price up front, guess it shouldn't surprise me too much that Accurev falls into that category...

Well, all I can say is that I completely agree. The back-end is great but the UI sucks. The stream functionality is great because it makes merging no brainier as all changes from parent streams are automatically propagated to all children. I wrote a post about Accurev UI that explains most of the shortcomings I've come across for last 2 years.

The sort answer:
Use the latest SVN server and SmartSVN (the community edition is free) as a client.
You will not pay anything and you can get everything you need.
The gory details:
BTW the feature of imposing the change management rules during checking is trivial to write as a SVN hook. We did it in a couple of hours, in one hundred lines (or thereabout) of code - it works wonderfully and never broke. It integrates SVN with Bugzilla and imposes rules such as:
In order to commit you have to enter a message
In order to commit you must have entered a Bugzilla ID that is in a "Valid" commit state.
... and so on, you can build your own rules to your heart's content
Accurev seems to be marketware to me ... lousy GUI client ... very slow (we had to upgrade the HW to make it actually work effectively), and of course ... you have to pay for it! Ah yes, if you do use it, I hope that you do not have to replicate your server between some place in the US and some place in India :)
Perforce is more robust but it is not very easy to administer. In any case, it is a superior product in comparison to Accurev.
VSS and stuff like that should not even be considered as "version control" systems when it comes to writing professional software (typically, enterprise software) in the 21st century. That's like writing your reports on a typewriter ;-)
If you know what you are doing (with your software) then SVN will be a robust and efficient solution for you. With (at least) two robust and efficient revision control systems in existence today (SVN/GIT) there is very little room to justify working with a proprietary solution; some reasons could be "inertia": you have it, you don't care paying for it, and you didn't have any major issues -- in other words, it works for you.
I use SVN everywhere, when it didn't exist I was using CVS, and before that ... no I am not going to tell you how old I am ;-)
Hope this helped ...
Ciao.

I've been the SVN and Accurev administrator for a time. Accurev took a long time to grow on me - about six months, but I like it now for a corporate enterprise environment. Here's a few things to consider.
Pros:
Personal code history
The code changes are kept on the server when the users performs a keep. The keep is personal to the user and doesn't distribute to other users until a promote command is issued.
The code performed by a keep is kept on the server and available even if the user performs a revert operation.
In most cases, promoting the code to higher streams for distribution is fairly simple.
Administration is fairly simple
Installation works well
Performance is much improved on version 5.3 which changed the backend to a PostGres database
The CLI is rich and extensive
Cons:
A real clunky user interface
Resolving overlaps can be complex, just like conflicts in SVN
However, like any complex tool, your appreciation will increase the more you understand and know about it.

I used AccuRev at a previous job and didn't have any problems with it, but I very much prefer Subversion (even without comparing the price difference). I remember the client GUI being pretty slow too. Also, I do recall that the GUI just called their command-line utilities to interface with the repository. So, it probably won't be that hard to use those interfaces for your DIY tools.

I have used Accurev for one year. I don't like it. Here are some problems I encountered:
1. Its GUI is terrible: it's so slow that each time I switch between tabs (streams and workspaces) or perform some actions I have to wait for several seconds. It sometimes gave you a confusing error message that could not help find what's wrong.
2. It has so many concepts that you have to spend much time learning Accurev itself.
3. I once encountered such a problem: I have a version controlled file modified by our build process. Later my teammate moved that file to other location in his workspace and promoted the change. When I run "accurev update" it simply told me "some file has been moved" and everything looked normal. But actually the command stopped at the moved file and no longer updated other files. It's very confusing - your update command did not update the worksapce but you have no idea about it. The only outputed message "some file has been moved" looked just like other verbose output. It did not tell me my update failed or aborted or something else.
Before that I used SVN and ClearCase. SVN is a great tool, simple and easy to use. And I did not have so many complaints about ClearCase. Accurev is really frustrating...

I've just come across this discussion and thought I would share our experiences with AccuRev.
We have been using the Dimensions SCM from Serena for around 8 years. Two years ago we had a major problem integrating our India based Development team with our UK Dev team. It was clear that we were not going to meet our needs with the current system and hence we set about evaluating a number of options. I discuss all of this in this article How We Integrated Our Offshore Dev Team.
Our experience of using AccuRev has so far been very positive.
It is easy to setup and administer.
Users are able to get going very very quickly (especially important for the India dev team)
We've never had a problem with speed (in fact this is one of the main plus points for us)
The replication works like a dream
I do agree that the UI can be a bit clunky (especially the Unix client). I am hoping that it will be better in the latest version when we update to that next month.
All in all I would say that this was one of the best decisions and purchases we have made.

Note: I am an AccuRev user and I like it very much. I have already upvoted a few answers here, and would like to add:
I've just recently stumbled over this "review" of AccuRev in the book Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley:
[Chapter 14, p 385]
Commercial Version Control Systems
(...) the only commercial VCSs that we are able to wholeheartedly recommend are:
(...)
AccuRev. Offers ClearCase-like ability to do stream-based development without the crippling administrative overhead and poor performance associated with ClearCase.
(...)
To which I might add that I never have used ClearCase, but I am the AccuRev admin around here, and it is indeed very little work to administer. (WRT performance, this question might give more insight.)