I don’t like to complain… it takes a lot of effort and it has no benefit to my life at all. I rarely work with people or tools with which I can’t find a good rhythm. However, I’ve reached a boiling point today and have to vent.

I’ve worked with quite a few of the SCM packages out there in my 15+ years in software development. In my new job, I’ve been thrown into the yawning abyss of StarTeam by Borland. Granted, while the concepts of product itself are not hard to grasp, the implementation of these concepts, in conjunction with a poorly designed interface, is making code management much more of a job than it has ever been for me.

Also, throw in the fact that the processes set up in our department sometimes defy logic (well, mainstream logic, I’m certain there is some kind of logic behind it all).

The concept of breaking up tickets into Change Requests and Tasks certainly sounds promising but it opens a Pandora’s Box if the people using the system are clueless. I’ll keep the atomic process of making individual tickets.

Are Visual Diff and Visual Merge really the best products they could have integrated into StarTeam? I would have rather they left those tools out and required that a third-party tool be integrated.

I don’t want to even get started on floating configuration. I would never trust this process to a tool (especially one this poorly written), and, again, the potential for misuse is huge which ends up wasting a lot of people’s time.

I hate the system tray icon notifications when you have a new task assigned. You double click on the icon and that opens a popup window listed all the new item. Does clicking on the item take you to the task in StarTeam? No, it forcibly loads the “Form Server” (whatever the hell that is and it takes 30 seconds to load up) and open the actual item in another popup. Brilliant.

Ok, that’s the end of my rant. I’ll conclude with the concession that StarTeam may actually be a better product than I’m giving it credit for and that it’s implementation here is faulty. Whichever it is, I hate it.