OpenText Dimensions CM vs. Sourcetree

Serena CM is well suited to highly controlled, audited, and process driven environments. It will allow strict segregation of duties, and change traceability. If implemented correctly it will help you quickly build trusts with your auditors. It is also well suited to environments that require constant branching and merging. Due to the complexity of the product and learning curve for your development and operations team it may be overkill in a small shop with loose rules

Incentivized

Sourcetree is a great tool for any Git user. Whether you're well versed using Git commands in the terminal or a newbie, this tool wonderfully supplements your workflow. A quick glance at the UI and you know where your project stands. I find it most helpful when I need to determine what changed in a particular file in past commits. Having a visual graph of branches helps me to understand the big picture. Even though I'm comfortable operating Git most often in the command line, I always have Sourcetree open to check my work and see where my colleagues are.

Incentivized

• Code Promotion: Dimensions CM allows supervisors to control changes to code, in that they delegate requests to developers, and act as a gatekeeper prior to promoting to the next environment. This functionality is configurable so you can set up a workflow that best fits the structure and requirements of your own company.
• Code Repository for changes and versioning: Code can be checked out by item or by synchronizing folders. Code revisions can be compared against other revisions or work files. Item histories show which developers made which modifications, and which supervisor and operations personnel were involved in assigning the request and promoting the code to each environment. Additionally a pedigree will show a stream diagram which graphically displays branches and merges.
• Deployment: Serena Change Management offers help automating deployment including integrations with SVN and Jenkins. Its newer versions also have a powerful graphical deployment automation tool (Serena Deployment Automation- SDA). It comes with a certain amount of licenses built-in. If you have a many nodes to deploy to there will be separate licensing costs for that.

Incentivized

• Merge Changes - helping you handle merge conflicts.
• Comparing branches.
• Visually showing various paths that existing branches are following.
• It is easy to import already downloaded repositories.
• And it integrates with Bitbucket (web), where I can click a menu in Bitbucket and have it download and import the repo to my local environment.

Incentivized

• The only major negative that I have encountered with Serena CM product is that the very power and flexibility of the tool means there is a risk that you will make a mess of things. In other words it gives you plenty of rope to tangle yourself with. I recommend careful, well thought out deployments implementing the built in roles and workflows that can be turned on and configured, using a consistent methodology.
• My experience with the Serena help desk support has not been impressive. Though reasonably polite and diligent, the technicians were well trained, and often gave bad advise and terrible scripts. On several occasions I had to rewrite scripts they have me; if I had run them as provided they would have caused even more difficulties than the problem I was trying to solve. I speak of the support in the past tense because I conditioned myself not to call them, it was usually just easier to solve nay problems my self. They do have a good account management team though, and for any major issues you can go thru them.

Incentivized

• As an Atlassian product i'd have expected smart integrations/features with their other developer products like Jira or BitBucket, but this is not the case. It can sometimes pick up on Jira ticket IDs and show them as a label or as a unique piece of work to follow. But there's no actual integration to Jira and is just simple pattern matching.
• For the majority of developers it's just overwhelming and overkill. There's a plethora of metadata, supporting information, and many many actions/tools to help perform complex git actions. This is great if you're managing complex repos or need to perform an audit, but to the average user it's just not a user friendly experience due to how bloated it can feel.
• Very simple git actions such as 'git pull' have been massively overcomplicated. When pressing the pull button you get a popup with multiple dropdowns, checkboxes and settings on how you want to pull and the followup actions to run after the pull, both on the remote repo and local repo. It's just unnecessary and adding complexity where it's not needed.

Incentivized

It is one of the best Git GUIs out there, I have worked with multiple GUIs and this provides more insights and features compared to others, the Tree view and History helps keeping track and reverting commits, With help of different UI elements it helps the new developers to learn git using standards as well.

Incentivized

Serena CM is superior to Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) in overall functionality, but does not have very good native integration with Microsoft. Therefore in a Microsoft centric shop with no audit needs ,TFS would be better. Otherwise I would choose Serena CM

Incentivized

Sourcetree allows seamless integration across all widely used GIT services and is cross-platform compatible. This client is capable of managing workflows of any difficulty and its cross-compatibility eliminates the need to use different or multiple GIT clients altogether.

Incentivized

• Serena has facilitated our annual completion of various audit and technology control certifications. These certifications make a huge difference to our company's reputation and bottom line.
• There has been no negative impact on our company.

Incentivized

• Makes using Git more pleasurable increasing developer happiness.
• Visual display of branches and commits with their diff helps me find problems quickly.
• Complex Git commands are only a click away using Sourcetree.

Incentivized