What is Rational ClearCase?

[Anuj Dhawan]

IBM Rational ClearCase is a software configuration management solution that provides version control, work-space management, parallel development support, and build auditing. You can integrate Rational ClearCase with other IBM solutions, including IBM Rational Team Concert, IBM Rational ClearQuest, IBM Rational Asset Manager, and IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software. Rational ClearCase scales to any size team from small work-group to large, geographically distributed teams.

The Rational ClearCase family consists of several software tools for supporting software configuration management (SCM) of source code and other software development assets. It is developed by the Rational Software division of IBM. ClearCase forms the base for configuration management for many large and medium sized businesses and can handle projects with hundreds or thousands of developers.

A part of Rational ClearCase is revision control system, which is a feature for end users. ClearCase supports two kinds of use models, UCM (Unified Change Management), and base ClearCase. UCM provides an out-of-the-box model while base ClearCase provides a basic infrastructure (upon which UCM is built). Unified Change Management (UCM) is the object-oriented realization of ClearCase, a set of software tools typically supporting the process area software configuration management. Both can be configured to support a wide variety of needs. UCM is part of RUP (Rational Unified Process) and therefore all process templates and roles can be used from RUP.

ClearCase can run on a number of platforms including AIX, z/OS, Linux, HP-UX, Solaris, and Windows.[1] It can handle large binary files, large numbers of files, and large repository sizes. It handles branching, labeling, and versioning of directories.