CLIENT

INDUSTRY

LOCATION

SOLUTION

CHALLENGE

SOLUTION

RESULTS

Executive summary

Teranet

State/Provincial Government Registry Systems

Canada

Integrated Gerrit/ Git and JIRA deployment, ClearCase/ClearQuest migration

and end-user Training/Transition planning and delivery

• An outdated, unwieldy source code version management system

and manual code review process creating delays in the development

process.

• Developer productivity and efficiency were being affected.

• Git expertise was needed for a move to a better option.

• Adoption of Open Source Git DVCS and Gerrit Code Review tools

• Clearvision guidance and consultancy

• Use of Clearvision’s CMBridge tool to support the ClearCase to Git

migration process

• Clearvision Git, Gerrit and JIRA training support

• Code revisions can now be reviewed on screen instead of needing a

manual process.

• Creating a local source code snapshot view/clone has gone down from

45 minutes to less than five.

• Support and maintenance costs have been reduced by an order of

magnitude.

Clearvision allows Teranet to slash code development costs

The developer of one of the world’s most advanced land registration systems cuts coding costs significantly while improving efficiency.

PAGE 1 - CLEARVISION CASE STUDY, TERANET COPYRIGHT © CLEARVISION-CM 2016

About Teranet

Teranet is an international leader and pioneer in electronic land

registration systems and commerce.

In Ontario, Teranet is the exclusive provider of online property search and

registration. Teranet developed, owns and operates the Ontario Electronic

Land Registration System, enabling customers to perform searches,

transfer title documents through our search and registration capabilities,

and perform many other functions in what is widely recognized as one

of the world’s most advanced, secure, and sophisticated land registry

systems.

Teranet develops business-to-government (B2G) and business-to-

business (B2B) e-service solutions that enable organizations to greatly

enhance the services they provide to their customers. With a unique

combination of capabilities and state-of-the-art systems, Teranet is at the

forefront of delivering service potential in the land, legal, and financial

services industries as well as enabling electronic government service

delivery organizations make their data more accessible and ultimately of

more value to them and their stakeholders.

The challenge

Teranet, which owns and operates The Property Registry (TPR) in Manitoba

as well as Ontario’s Electronic Land Registration System (ELRS), relies heavily

on the skills of almost 100 code developers. Essential to its success is the

work of a software development lifecycle tools team, which is responsible

for maintaining the infrastructure that supports product development

in the company.

This historically included an IBM Rational ClearCase software configuration

management solution for source code version control, workspace

management, parallel development support and build auditing. In 2010,

however, the system was failing to live up to expectations. “What we

found was that ClearCase was very maintenance intensive,” says Steve

Brackenbury, Senior Systems Architect at Teranet.

“The development tools support team was spending an awful lot of time

answering questions and patching. It was consuming a lot of time and if we

didn’t keep the environment patched then IBM wasn’t willing to provide us

with support.”

In addition, the ClearCase toolset was quite outdated, with a Windows

based interface, and could not be integrated with more modern tools that

Teranet wanted to adopt. “It was a prehistoric product and we wanted

something that would fit in nicely with the other tools we were using,”

Brackenbury comments.

COPYRIGHT © CLEARVISION-CM 2016 CLEARVISION CASE STUDY, TERANET - PAGE 2

The solution

Teranet considered moving off ClearCase for a number of years, and

researched a number of other systems. “We looked at Subversion and some

other commercial source code management products, but they came with

a whole suite of additional tools we didn’t need and were quite expensive,”

recalls Brackenbury.

“They didn’t really fit well with our long-term goal of having something that

was simple to use, inexpensive to support and that had a good knowledge

base so we wouldn’t have to hire consultants when we wanted to make a

configuration change.”

Among the tools Teranet decided to try out were two free Open Source tools:

Git, a popular and widely used distributed source code revision control and

management system originally developed by Linus Torvalds to manage the

Linux kernel and Gerrit, a web based Git repository access management and

code review tool developed for and used by the Google Android project.

After using, and liking, the tools during a six month trial period in 2011, the

development team piloting the tools asked the company management to

formally introduce them for use across the organization.

Although they had selected a set of replacement tools for ClearCase and

Clearquest, Teranet faced the daunting task of migrating their development

teams and the associated in-flight projects to those new tools. To help them,

they sought an experienced partner and picked Clearvision “because of their

experience and expertise.”

As a Git migration expert, with specific expertise in migrating from legacy

tools like ClearCase, Clearvision was the obvious choice for a partner.

Clearvision provides a comprehensive Git migration service that:

• Saves time and avoids disruptions, since Clearvision deals with the

technical complexity and delivers a successful migration with minimal

interruption to development teams.

• Is tailored to client needs, with a scalable process matched to customer

migration requirements and complete knowledge transfer to allow

clients to become rapidly self-sufficient.

- Steve Brackenbury, Senior Systems Architect

“We needed to know that we had a good, solid plan that would work. This is where Clearvision really excelled.” ”

PAGE 3 - CLEARVISION CASE STUDY, TERANET COPYRIGHT © CLEARVISION-CM 2016

• Is safe and effective, since Clearvision has helped many organizations

worldwide migrate to Git, all following a best-practice migration

approach.

“What we liked about Clearvision was that it was a small shop with a

ClearCase background, so they knew the products well and could guide us

on how to do this migration,” Brackenbury says. “At the time there wasn’t

a well known path. We needed to know that we had a good, solid plan that

would work. This is where Clearvision really excelled.”

Now and the futureClearvision now supports Teranet on a variety of tools, including Git and the

Atlassian suite.

It’s a big shift but Clearvision are here to help at every step. Teranet is just one example of the large organisations Clearvision has migrated from a legacy tool to the open source successor Git. Find out more about the services available to you.

Still using ClearCase, Subversion or Perforce?

Give Git a go.

Migrating to Git >

COPYRIGHT © CLEARVISION-CM 2016 CLEARVISION CASE STUDY, TERANET - PAGE 4