Hello, my name is dizzy. Hi dizzy. I'm a Technician.

As a technician at a large Consumer Electronics corporation, it is currently my job to administer the source code management for an R&D department. This should be a straightforward task.

But of course, straightforward is boring. Therefore whoever is in charge of the universe, or blind fate, has deemed it necessary to make my life more "interesting". I am rapidly discovering how much of a curse it can be to live in "interesting times"

The project I am currently administering is a multi-platform project. This means that the relatively simple SourceSafe cannot be used. Primarily because we once used Rational Rose, a manager decided that it would be a good idea to have a Unified Change Management solution. UCM means that you can map changes in code to bugs or feature requests. Now this manager, brainwashed by Rational software's sales pitches, decided to spend many tens of thousands of pounds on ClearCase. Despite impassioned pleas to use either Perforce or CVS, ClearCase was installed, not on a Solaris server, but on an NT server. This was due to the simple reason that the manager who made the decision doesn't like UNIX, and didn't consider that we would be developing cross-platform software.

The manager who decided that NT would be used has now left, to start up his own dot-com. Good riddance. But before he left, he made sure that we would not simply install CVS and forget about ClearCase. This manager decided to tell our General Manager that he was concerned our "investment" in ClearCase would be wasted. Hence, now any problem we have with the software will be completely ignored at a management level, because they want to protect their investment.

It would seem that protecting an investment in managerspeak translates to "We will never admit our mistakes, or try to rectify them".

The NT server that ClearCase runs on has multiple hardware faults, but because of Rational's draconian node locked licensing it would be a massive task to move our software to another server or to take the server down for maintenance. Of course, it would also cost us a fortune if we wanted to change our software and run Clearcase on UNIX instead of NT.

So we are stuck. We cannot change our software, we cannot change our hardware and we cannot use a our purchased software as intended. All because some managers will never admit they are wrong?

It makes we wonder how many billions of pounds are lost each year through "protection of investment syndrome"?

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