December 5, 2007

Perforce, whose source code control tools are often used by organizations like SAP or Google who have built their own custom tooling for software development, is adding a software development kit (SDK) to reduce the guesswork of integrating its tooling. Although the new SDK is supposed to be general purpose, it has been developed especially with the idea of linking defect tracking tools.

The new SDK provides an alternative to building point integrations through command line or scripting. It includes a replication engine, so you can reproduce coding artifacts or metadata for a defect tracker. It also includes a configuration tool for mapping elements or fields between programs. Perforce has also thrown in some sample integration source code to help you get started in designing a point integration.

Although Perforce’s goal was developing a general purpose SDK, the linking source code control and defect tracking tends to be a no brainer since the two functions are obviously closely related in the software development cycle. Source code that is checked in should be vouchsafed for defects.

Founded a dozen years ago, Perforce has tended to cultivate a purist focus, as it has never strayed out of software configuration management (SCM) to add other areas, like defect tracking, project management, or testing, as part of some application lifecycle management (ALM) strategy. It promotes the claim that its engine is lighter weight than alternatives like IBM ClearCase, and it also claims to be more developer friendly. Of course, if you know some developers, that statement could be considered an oxymoron, as purists swear by basic command line tools or bare bones code editors like Emacs.

But Perforce developed the SDK because it was getting more demand for tighter integration with other best of breed tools, not to mention demand for look and feels that appear more native with the Visual Studio and Eclipse IDE platforms that have become de facto standards. It is currently working on more natively plugs to both IDEs, and on the horizon, is looking at how and whether to respond to demand from some customers to develop hooks into Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System (VSTS).

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