Using StarTeam Effectively

This was an odd session. The room was full, about 25 people. The speaker, Scott Green, started off with a lot of what I considered to be pretty basic stuff. This was listed as an intermediate session, wasn't it? He actually walked through all the options in the client, explaining what they did. Wasn't it obvious?

After the first hour or so, I was ready to write this off as a refresher course. It was obvious from the "how long have you used StarTeam" survey that the only people in the room with more experience than me worked for StarBase or Borland. The teacher, an ex-StarBase guy, obviously knew his stuff, but he wasn't very smooth, which made the experience more frustrating.

Once the first break came, it was like a switch was flipped. Everyone gathered on their own into little groups to discuss things in more detail, and they did so spontaneously. this was the mental wakeup call I needed. Some good discussion, some caffeinated beverage (I'm at sleep+16 hours now), and some friendly people in an environment that would allow us to laugh about our big mistakes. When the break ended, Scott mentioned that one of his conversations is that users aren't being trained well enough to realize that file status actually work, which is why people use the file locks to go back to 'SourceSafe mode'. There were a few people in the room like that, and you could see the light bulbs turning on.

Things continuously got more interesting. The speaker started going into the ten types of views, along with the business cases for using them. While he wasn't always totally clear with his points, the crowd was awake enough to draw the necessary details out of him with a good discussion. At the end, the topic of backup came up. The discussion came down to myself, Scott, Steve Reynolds, and Joe Schulz. People are still fascinated that you can move to a 0-downtime model.

Quote of the session: "Hokey-Pokey Build Process". This technique is where you use moveable build labels or promotion states to include or exclude items. You put the CR in, you take the CR out, etc.