Maintaining mutiple versions of an application

Question

Could someone tell me how are multiple versions of an application are maintained using a tool like TFS or ClearCase? Say, a project was created for a single client and over a couple of years the company has customized this with some major changes and sold it to 10 other customers also. So in the end how do we maintain different versions of the app to address each customer's concerns?

Answer 1

ClearCase like TFS offers branches which allows you to maintain a same set of files in parallel.

See:

• "What are the basic clearcase concepts every developer should know?"
  Complex projects are usually managed with ClearCase UCM.
• "Migrating a branching strategy from ClearCase to TFS 2010"

In particular, the "Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching and Merging Guide" provides a good guide (that you can apply to ClearCase as well) for managing branches.