CA Harvest Software Change Manager Reviews

It has helped us to integrate version control with change management. That has helped us track the application flow across each of our environments, promotion from dev to our higher environments, to production. The tracking aspect of the tool is one of the primary benefits, with security. That helps us keep tabs on all of the promotions, and we are able to manage write approvals before it goes into production.

CA Harvest has been one of our primary version control tools. It has helped us map all of our applications into a version control environment, where we are able to map them, and help the code promotion across each environment, and we are able to deploy them in a safe manner.

One feature that we are looking for is traceability, and also merging. That is a little cumbersome right now. We have provided our feedback to their representatives so they can provide us a good merging capability next time.

One thing that I would like to improve is making the tool a little more user friendly. It takes a little bit of time to adjust to the tool because it's a little different than other version control tools out there in the market. But, it has its own benefits and own security, but that user experience, if they're going to improve it, that would be really great.

It has been a stable solution. We have more than 250 applications hosted, and it helps us keep them together in the same application. Because of the database involved, and because of the aspect of controlling the application, it has helped us keep the environment stable. Whenever we get a new patch, we are able to test it in our lower environment before we take it to production. So, Harvest has been a very stable tool for us.

We have tested the scalability aspect, because we have grown from a small organization into such a large organization. We have onboarded applications which were not in Harvest before. We were using different version control tools before, like SVN and some other open-source tools. We were able to migrate those applications from those tools into Harvest, and scale all the applications in Harvest.

Technical support has been really great. For all of our problems, we are able to reach out to them. The solutions have come back soon. They have been providing those solutions in patches so that we don't disrupt the entire application. We are able to test it and integrate it quickly. We have many challenges. We work with a lot of the teams. We are, of course, working together. It has been a one-team experience for us.

We had been using multiple solutions across our organization, but we wanted to bring in an enterprise solution, which would be common across all our applications. We were working with Endevor for our mainframe applications, and that's how we brought Harvest in. And it has been a great advantage to consolidate all our tools into this one solution.

I was not directly involved in the first-time set up, but I've been involved in a lot of migrations, taking applications from other version control tools into Harvest, and that has been a good experience.

We had other vendors which we were looking at, but one advantage is that CA came to us with a solution rather than the tool. The solution helped us understand that the tool would be a good benefit for us if we bring it in, and because of the audit capability, etc., that was the primary thing that we were looking for.

One thing that we really look for when selecting a vendor is the interaction that would help problem solving; an interaction where we tell them our problem and they, not as sales, try to provide us a solution, rather than trying to sell the tool itself. So, that solution was what benefited us and we understood the solution well before we got the tool in.

The auditing capability is one aspect that I would really recommend other colleagues to look into, because all the other version control tools out in the market provide speed, but the auditing capability is missing; the change management interaction; etc. I would say look at that aspect, so you are not really tracking, and you have better visibility and traceability of the code promotion.

It has been a really good solution, getting in all our applications together, and creating a change management kind of a workflow. I haven’t given it a perfect rating because I still want the user experience to be better; to improve; make it faster in terms of understanding the tool.

We use this solution for software configuration management. It's the whole lifecycle. It's the application, server application, deployment, and version control.

We use an on-premises deployment.

Using this solution, we were able to implement a full process for all of our lifecycles. 

While all of the features are valuable, we use a lot of the UDPs. They normally link to all of the purchases that are being used in a project.

They've got a lot of processes that come planned as part of the application, but with the UDPs, you can scale it, or build your own scripts and deployment mechanisms. It's really scalable from a functionality point of view. If there's an issue with functionality out of the box, then you can take care of that via the UDP processes.

The interface is very user-friendly. 

Technical support for this solution is very good, although they can still use improvement in some regards.

We have been using this solution for about fifteen years.

This solution is really, really stable.

This is a scalable solution, for sure. We have approximately one hundred and fifty people using it and plan on increasing our usage.

Our experience with technical support has been very good. I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. The deployment takes ten to fifteen minutes.

There are three of us in my team who manage and maintain this solution.

We have seen ROI using this solution.

The licensing costs for this solution are very reasonable. Once you purchase your licenses, there is maintenance support that is renewed every year.

We did evaluate other solutions before choosing thing one, including a product from Compuware. It was not up to standard.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to read all of the documentation. Be sure to stick to the implementation and installation instructions as to how they are provided.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The company is confidential and this is privileged information. I'm not at liberty to discuss this but we are in the financial services industry.

We are able to implement proper controls into our software development life cycle. The application is adaptable to which development strategy you use (waterfall, agile etc.).

The ability to give our teams functionality from a control perspective, allowing them to decide how they want to implement the tool, is valuable.

Security features can be improved. Password complexity is not enforced by the tool. Passwords do not expire. User documentation in some cases is vague or is not helpful.

I appreciate the ability to separate the code by environments.

We are required to use this, but I personally wouldn’t have chosen it as our SCM of choice.

It needs to be simpler. This is the most difficult SCM tool I’ve ever used. It requires me to retrain new hires for several months. They should mimic TFS or Tortoise SVN.

The most common mistakes/hurdles new users have is checking in new files, or checking for updates.

If you don’t have your paths set perfectly, it’ll create a subfolder and all the files go in the wrong place, causing a headache to get it all fixed (so far, every new hire I’ve had has done this, some more than once).

The other issue, if you take a script for SQL Server Management Studio, save it, then check it in, it’ll most likely fail with an error message that doesn’t really give you any idea why it failed. So, you have to open the script in another text editor, and change the format to ANSI or something else to get it to work.

Another issue, sometimes, if I check out a file for update, and copy a file from another spot over this one, sometimes it works fine, other times it doesn’t detect any changes (this doesn’t detect changes issue happens in other scenarios as well, I can’t give a solid way to duplicate it).

Creating folders is not very intuitive either, for example, sometimes I need to create a blank folder (say to store attachments from users). You can’t create folders in SCM, the only way to create a folder is to check in a file that’s in a folder and have it create it.

So you have to create a temporary file, check that in to create the folder, then delete the file. Hope this helps, the learning curve is steep for a source control program.

I have used it for four years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I have never used it.

In previous companies, I utilized TFS, GitHub, and Tortoise SVN.

The installation was easy, but learning to use it was complex. Sometimes it wouldn’t recognize file changes. If the paths weren’t correct, it would put files into the wrong folders.

Pick another tool if you can

We did not evaluate alternatives as this was corporate mandated.

Choose another product!

CA Mainframe Software Manager (CA Harvest SCM) provides a great way for us to store our source control. It provides the lifecycle features to identify where our source code is in the lifecycle of our software. The lifecycle stuff is probably the biggest feature that I like.

The benefit is really around the lifecycle features of the tool. It benefits our organization because it allows us to customize that lifecycle to match what we do, which makes it extremely easy for us to see where we are.

One of my personal favorite source control systems is Git. I've always been a huge fan of it. It is very, very easy to use. Things like GitHub and Bitbucket do a great job of managing Git and making it really, really easy for us to do things like polar requests for code reviews, and the separation of code into different swim lanes. That kind of management is really hard to do in Harvest, and I'd like to see that brought into the CA Mainframe Software Manager (CA Harvest SCM) product.

It does support us with our lifecycle, but the challenges with using it from a developer's point of view bring my score down a little bit. The features don’t always working as advertised.

The stability definitely could use some improvement. The software suite doesn't necessarily crash all the time, but some of the advertised features don't always work the way they've been promoted to work.

Scalability is very good. We use it on an enterprise level. We have a lot of outpatients who store their source code in there and we've never had any issues.

We were previously using a different solution. We ended up switching because we were out of support of the previous solution and we needed to upgrade to something. The old product was no longer being supported or created.

If you have a strong desire for lifecycle with your source control management system, then by all means, CA Mainframe Software Manager (CA SCM) is the tool that should be researched and looked at. One word of advice is that CA is coming up with a new product called Unified Source Control. It provides an architecture that allows your developers to work with whatever tools they want, but in the backend, it uses CA Mainframe Software Manager (CA SCM).

When looking for a vendor, the thing that I really look for is enterprise support. We've worked with a couple small companies, and support has been a real big challenge. Enterprise support is one of the huge things for me.

The most valuable feature I would say is we can integrate that with our change management process and use that to control what goes into production and what doesn't. That is very important for us as any change that happens gets very closely watched, especially when we are making emergency changes or fixes. Harvest supports our change management process. That's where it shines.

Organizationally, the main benefit is it supports our processes and it helps implement them effectively.

When you're trying to do collaboration or when you're trying to cater to multiple users and developers who submit code changes, it gets challenging with Harvest. Typically, what we do is we lock the code as it gets checked out and we check it back in and benefits unlocked. When you are trying to do collaborative work, especially when your development streams are distributed, they are not co-located. Your people are working on multiple features affecting the same code. That's where it gets challenging, and other products in the market seem to be doing a better job at those features.

We have been using Harvest for several years now. In earlier years, I saw some stability issues, but recently I wouldn't say that. We had some issues where we were upgrading from an older version of Harvest to a newer version. There were some manual steps, and if we missed something, then we'd have to apply patches manually.

There were also times with the Harvest plug-in was incompatible with a new version of Eclipse. Developers had to use Workbench in order to use the Eclipse plug-in. That was a challenge.

The company grew through mergers and acquisitions. Some of the merged or acquired companies had their own margin control system other than Harvest. But in terms of pure scalability, it's catered to our needs so far.

We have another team that handles interactions with technical support, so I wouldn't know about that.

I was not involved.

Pick it if it fits your needs. If you have an environment where your development workforce is controlled, it's contained, and you want higher change management, then Harvest definitely seems like the way to go.