Among the messiest challenges in the software development lifecycle is having the confidence that the builds that you are assembling represent the latest versions of the code, and that there be QA data to ensure that what was successfully tested during development also builds properly.

have teamed up to integrate their offerings. The integration reverses the usual process, where software is released from a configuration management system and assembled into a build. Instead, Electric Cloud’s Electric Commander will poll the AccuRev system at specified intervals to pull out the latest versions, excluding those which are still in the process of being checked in. And it will become the system of record for running the usual spate of unit and smoke tests on those builds, with the option of feeding those results back to AccuRev where it is associated with specific releases.

The two companies are hardly strangers, in that each has presence in at least a quarter or more of the other’s accounts. Both companies claim that the other represents the fastest growing part of their installed base. But until now integration has been custom, on a job by job basis.

There is potential synergy, not just in the fact that both occupy adjacent parts of the software development lifecycle, but that both take object-oriented approaches to managing software versioning and builds. For instance, AccuRev manages what it calls “streams” which associates configurations with code, as opposed to more conventional branching. Meanwhile, Electric Cloud takes a similar approach to associating code with builds. However at this point, the integration between both tools does not directly take advantage of these aspects of their common architectural approaches.

The new integration is part of a ramping up of joint marketing and product development. However, while both are doing joint prospecting, there are no plans yet for promotional bundling, which would be a logical result.

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