Rational Synergy

Rational Synergy

Original author(s)	CaseWare, Inc.
Developer(s)	Rational Software
Initial release	1990 (1990)
Stable release	7.2.1.4 / September 23, 2015 (2015-09-23)
Written in	Accent, Java
Operating system	AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris, Windows
Type	Software configuration management
License	IBM EULA
Website	www.ibm.com/software/products/en/ratisyne

Rational Synergy is a software tool that provides software configuration management (SCM) capabilities for all artifacts related to software development including source code, documents and images as well as the final built software executable and libraries. Rational Synergy also provides the repository for the change management tool known as Rational Change. Together these two tools form an integrated configuration management and change management environment that is used in software development organizations that need controlled SCM processes and an understanding of what is in a build of their software.

The name Synergy refers to its database level integration with Change Management that provides views into what is in a build in terms of defects.

History

Synergy began life in 1988 as a research project for computer-aided software engineering by software developer Pete Orelup at Computers West of Irvine, California. Computers West was supporting itself through contract software development and an application for finance and insurance at automobile dealerships on the Pick OS, and probably had fewer than 10 employees.

In 1989, the company decided to pursue development of a software configuration management and revision control product, renamed itself CaseWare, Inc., and hired three more developers, Alan Wright, Kris Meissner, and Greg Holmberg. The system was re-imagined as a platform for building SCM systems running on Unix (Sun Solaris).

It was decided that a compiled language such as C++ was not sufficiently flexible, reliable, and productive, and so a new programming language was created, Accent. Accent has many features similar to Java, but pre-dates it by five years. It has a compiler that compiles to machine-independent byte-codes, and a virtual machine execution environment with automatic memory management. Except for the compiler and execution environment, the entire Amplify Control product was written in the Accent language, including a scalable, networked client-server architecture and use of a SQL database with a schema flexible enough to allow customer extension of the built-in data types in Accent without changes to the physical schema.

CaseWare Amplify Control also included a distributed build automation and continuous integration system, much like today's Maven and Hudson tools. It was first released in 1990. Later a bug tracking system was also built on the platform.

The company was somewhat successful, but lacked experienced leadership and started to lose market-share to ClearCase. In 1991 the company was nearly broke and the original developers walked out en masse. A new CEO, John Wark, was brought in, and the company was relaunched, although without the developers. Both CaseWare and Amplify Control were renamed to Continuus Software in 1993.

On July 29, 1999 Continuus Software announced a public offering listing its stock on the NASDAQ Stock Market. In October 2000, the Swedish software company Telelogic, agreed to purchase Continuus Software in a deal worth $42 million. Under Telelogic, Continuus was renamed to Synergy. In 2008 IBM announced that it had purchased Telelogic. Synergy was added to the IBM's Rational Software family of SCM tools and named Rational Synergy.

External links

• Rational Synergy
• IBM Knowledge Center for Rational Synergy
• Rational Synergy Documentation Library for documentation prior to version 7.2