Check out my collection of ClearCase posts and feel my pain.

Continuing our latest adventures with ClearCase, (I haven’t worked on anything else since Wednesday) today we reviewed the situation. We had to roll back the changes made on Thursday, due to side-effects that appeared. (Basically square one). Currently there’s no real solution in sight, but this is the least of our problems.

The problem is the confidence we’re losing with the contractor with each such side effect. Today we even mentioned the unmentionable: drop ClearCase and look somewhere else. (Relax, I don’t see us dropping it too soon). I’m not sure that it’s only the tool, but the caring it needs is of a level I never knew one needed.

So we huffed and puffed, and the contractors apologized, and sent someone (at the end of the day), but they are currently stumped. They sent the info we collected to Rational Holland for continuation, and will try to fix what they can. But…

I’m not sure that when they tell us their done, I’ll believe it.

This task is not supposed to be in-house knowledge. As a client, we see them responsible to see these things through completely. We rely on them to make the right steps and test the solution completely. And “completely” would be by their standard, since we don’t know what “completely” means.

Plus, we also pay them a lot. I though I’d mention that too.

And to add to that, we talked to IBM today, maybe they have an idea. The guy from IBM, while not going into details, suggested a few solutions. One of them contradicted in some way the currently implemented solution. Do they know how to make their clients happy or what?

So we’re having a session tomorrow with both teams to wrestle it out while we watch and cry. Not sure about the outcome. I know there’s a way out of this. I’m sure it’s not instantaneous, I know it’s not cheap, and I cannot see how we keep our ClearCase prowess reputation high following this.

And I’m in the middle.