Software Configuration Management Tool Adoption Trends In The Americas

Over the past three years, respondents to Forrester's annual Enterprise And SMB Software Survey have demonstrated increasing awareness and adoption of application life-cycle management (ALM) processes and tools. ALM 2.0 — the next generation of tool support for ALM — is a work in progress, but that's not stopping development shops from adopting new software configuration management (SCM), change management (CM), and release management tools. Simpler SCM tools such as Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, Subversion, and Serena PVCS prove to be the most frequently adopted class of configuration management tools, taking three of the top five spots in our survey. When it comes to full-featured software change and configuration management (SCCM) tools, IBM and Microsoft show a substantial lead in popularity over other commercial options. The integrated development environments (IDEs) and application platform that developers use are strong predictors of their configuration management tools choices, but company size and industry also matter. And when it comes to adopting open source SCM tools like Subversion, development professionals in the Americas lag significantly behind their European counterparts.