
Agile code development tool is optimised for use across multiple sites and repositories
Using Swarm, distributed development teams can improve their Agile practices, share creative ideas about their projects and get early feedback from continuous integration and deployment of their code.
“If you’re not updating your products constantly you’re quickly left behind,” said Marc Desfosses, lead tools programmer at Ubisoft. “We work with dozens of different studios to deliver AAA games such as Assassin’s Creed 3 and Far Cry 3. Swarm is the key to rapid multi-site collaboration. It lets programmers chime in on each other’s code immediately, get the feedback they need when they need it and even review code side-by-side. We’ve been hoping for a tool like this for a long time.”
To get to Continuous Delivery, development teams need to speed up their processes while ensuring high-quality code is provided into build, test and release tools and, ultimately, production servers. While code review has been applied in some organisations with success, until now the available tools have not offered both a great social experience and tight integration with an enterprise-class versioning system that supports distributed teams.
Swarm is a straight-forward web application that can be accessed anywhere. It allows developers to personalise their reviews—such as side-by-side or vertical comparisons—and comment right inside the code. Activity streams, project pages, notifications and a rich repository browser enable even distributed teams to make better use of Agile methodologies. Its flexible workflows, hooks for continuous integration and automatic deployment help optimise software production lines. Because Swarm uses the Perforce versioning engine, all comments and conversations are automatically stored along with the code itself, eliminating any extra steps for security, back-up or compliance.
Swarm’s key features include contextual code conversations to ensure better team collaboration and faster delivery through code snippet comments and conversations, which are stored and always accessible to display the full context of the change, as well as flexible code review workflow that quickly discovers coding errors through flexible peer or designated-person review workflows with pre- or post-commit review options. There is also Side-by-Side or Vertical Diff tools to conduct code reviews with a diff tool that features inline comments and conversations. Developers using Perforce Git Fusion can use Swarm to review the code they’ve submitted from Git repositories alongside colleagues storing code to the Perforce versioning engine. Continuous Integration (CI) hooks also enable users to know whether a change has passed acceptance tests before looking at it in detail. Users can adapt and extend Swarm by connecting third-party tools, while Swarm can connect new code to existing deployment processes to automatically set-up and run new versions on a staging or production server.
“Swarm shortens the path from a developer making a change to customers getting the benefits,” said Christopher Seiwald, CEO of Perforce. “By bringing together all the information developers need to deliver quality code and providing it in an interface that doesn’t get in their way, Swarm helps teams work in tighter loops to match the pace of today’s faster release cadences.”
The full Perforce product family is provided free to unlimited users for 45-day team evaluations. Like all Perforce products, Swarm is also free to teams of up to 20 users—including access to Perforce technical support. Additionally, Perforce is provided at no cost for perpetual use and with unlimited seats when used for open source projects or by educational institutions.
www.perforce.com
