A quick introduction about Collabnet: The leader in application life cycle management platforms for distributed software development teams. With more than 1.8 million developers using their platform, Collabnet supports more than 800 companies in their distributed development, offshoring, outsourcing and partner co-development efforts. Founded upon open source principles, Collabnet is also the company behind Subversion, the next-generation Software Configuration Management (SCM) solution. Subversion has more than 5 million users worldwide.

Subversion was ranked as the sole leader in the standalone Software Configuration & Change Management space by the Forrester Wave report in May 2007. However, there are many SCM tools in the market from reputed software firms like IBM, Microsoft, Borland and Serena Software. Do you think Subversion will retain its current market leadership position?

Karthi: Yes, Subversion is the sole leader in SCM space. We have more than 5 mn users worldwide using it. They have made Collabnet-sponsored Subversion as the new standard for version control and Software Configuration Management (SCM). With its recent release 1.5 and 1.6, subversion has all the features which an enterprise customer looks for in any SCM tool. Subversion adoption commands 40+% of the market share and it is growing very rapidly. SVN community is also working towards every 6 month releases to bring in new features into the market. So with all of these things, I’m sure, it will not only help Subversion to retain its market leardership position but also consolidate it further.

Collabnet has distributed development teams located across several continents and also leverages open source communities for its product development efforts. How do you communicate between these teams?

Karthi: CollabNet has distributed development teams for its core product development across continents. The teams use our own product, a distributed development platform (CollabNet TeamForge) to develop and communicate amongst various teams and partners. We have also open sourced a few of our products and integrations. We leverage open.collab.net as the collaboration platform to communicate to open source teams and customers. This site contains pretty much all the information related to all of our products – like features, downloads, faqs, roadmap, etc. It also has free and open forums where customers and users can join, and ask questions and interact with the developers and as a community help each other out.

As a product development company, can you just give us quick insight about the top 3 best practices that you enforce among your development teams?

Karthi: Sure. As a company, we follow a hybrid approach. We are founded upon open source principles, we are an enterprise company also. So we follow a hybrid of open and enterprise development cultures internally. We support open communication and discussion on public forums as against one-on-one emails. That’s one of the best practices we have. All important issues and decisions get discussed on public forums. This is very healthy for the organization and creates an opportunity for people to learn, you can just be a silent spectator on the forums and learn from that, or also contribute effectively to the discussions and the decisions. I find this to be one of the best practices that’s helping Collabnet.

We have also adopted agile methodology for our development. Agile methodology’s user-story based approach helps developers to understand and develop to the exact requirement of the story – we always hear about scope creeps and doing more but with Agile approach, you want to deliver to the base requirement of the story, nothing more or nothing less. That keeps the focus better.

We also do code reviews. That is another important practice we follow to make sure that the code is of high quality. It is not only for quality aspect but also helps to share the knowledge.

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW

READ THE TRANSCRIPT