Saturday, June 2, 2007

Unstoppable Subversion

Lots of Subversion news this week as the popularity and adoption continues to soar.

First, Forrester Research released their latest Forrester Wave where they analyzed the Software Configuration Management marketplace. For the first time, they included Subversion in their analysis, and what do you know, but Subversion actually came out on top for standalone SCM! They also analyzed integrated change management systems and included Subversion. It did surprisingly well considering that it really does not specifically address that space. You can download a copy of the report from CollabNet.

Next, the latest SecuritySpace.com numbers came out for the month of May and Subversion adoption continues to soar. See this chart for more information.

Finally, I participated in a webinar this week with Carey Schwaber of Forrester and my CollabNet colleague Auke Jilderda. You can view a replay here. This was my first time doing a webinar. I will probably try to make a post about the experience. It was a lot of work for 10 minutes and of course I screwed up the slides when control was transitioned to me. That really flustered me but I recovered. I just got up the courage to watch the replay this AM and it was a lot better than I thought, I actually came in at exactly 10 minutes. I am not sure how eager I will be to do another one anytime soon though because it just took up too much time to prepare. It is hard to do these well if you are not a pro speaker because you are so constrained for time. Anyway, the first 20 minutes of the webinar is Carey going over her report, the criteria used and an overview of SCM for distributed development teams. I then gave a quick overview of Subversion and why it is popular before covering the upcoming 1.5 release and some of its features. Auke then finished things off with an overview of the merge tracking feature which is the defining feature for 1.5. We then concluded with a fairly lengthy Q&A session. There were over 500 people connected which I understand to be a very large audience for one of these events. Clearly interest in Subversion is skyrocketing.