Our development team has use of the enterprise Rational suite. We use Rational Rose, Clearcase, and Clearquest frequently. I am in design mode right now. So I use Rose heavily. All of the Rose files are checked into Clearcase. The project is pretty big. Luckily most parts are split out into separate catalog (cat) files. I only load those units which I need. However I have some painful problems due to the slow networks here. It takes a long time to check files in and out of Clearcase.
Today I have determined what I call a severe perform or functional problem with Clearcase. I make use of the Clearcase support which is integrated into Rose. When I chose to check out a file, I get to enter the Clearcase comment for the check out. I like to enter very descriptive comments so I can reconstruct exactly what I did later by just looking at the comments. So I get to the comment dialog within Rose. Then I switch Windows tasks to another application to figure out what to type in for a comment. By the time I switch back to Rose, the screen has hung. It never comes back.
Now I will confess that this is not a crucial problem. But it is no fun to have to kill the Rose application with the Windows task manager. It is very slow launching it again and loading the units I need. I wonder if this is a problem that I should submit to IBM. For now I have a work around. Prior to checking anything out, I figure out what my check out comment will be. That way I do not have to switch tasks. And although Rose is slow when performing Clearcase tasks, at least the app eventually completes the task and comes back.
Aside from this problem, I find both Rose and Clearcase working pretty well. I imagine the enterprise suite license costs a lot of money. The product is provided by our customer so I do no know the details. I just assume the cost is high. For such a high price, I should not have to suffer from such bugs. As a developer, I can understand that perfect code is impossible to write. So I will but the IBM developers a little slack for now.
