Learning Perforce SCM

Robert Cowham is from a software development background with experience in roles from programming to testing and project management. He came across Perforce as a user in the early days of the company when there were only four employees. He subsequently became one of the two pre-qualifi ed Perforce Consulting Partners, and became a Perforce Certifi ed Trainer as soon as that program was implemented. Since then he has consulted for many companies and organizations, and trained thousands of users around the globe, from California to Japan, including giving training courses in German, French, and Italian. He has also written a number of integrations with Perforce. This includes P4OFC, which integrates with Microsoft Offi ce, and is still provided as an offi cially-supported public download. APIs developed by him include P4COM, a COM based API for use on Windows, and P4Python which he subsequently handed over to Perforce to support. He has also written various full history migration tools for customers to get them into Perforce. He has long had an interest in all aspects of confi guration management and was for several years a coauthor with Brad Appleton and Steve Berczuk of the Agile SCM column in the online CM Journal. He was Chair of the specialist group for Change, Confi guration and Release Management of the British Computer Society for seven years, organizing many events and conferences, and is still active on the committee. He regularly speaks at industry events. As Services Director for Square Mile Systems, Robert now also works with confi guration management of infrastructure and data centers, applying the same principles to the physical world. Robert has practiced the Japanese martial art of Aikido for over 20 years, and runs a dojo near his home in London. He has even managed to combine his interests with a well-received presentation on 'Black belt SCM techniques,' including physical demonstrations of the principles involved! Neal Ralph Firth assumed both individual contributor and management roles during the design, test, and development of both hardware and software used in stand-alone, embedded system, and real-time environments in his early career. Since the late 90's he has focused on source control and the automation of test and build systems. He fi rst encountered Perforce in its early days while investigating source control solutions for one of his fi rst consulting customers. He subsequently became a Perforce Consulting Partner and a Perforce Certifi ed Trainer as soon as those certifi cations were available to him. He has consulted for hundreds of companies and organizations, and trained thousands of Perforce users and administrators across the US and Canada. His career has had a focus on automation and the tools that make people more productive. His early work with hardware microcode simulation was chronicled as part of Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer prize winning book 'The Soul of a New Machine'. He has presented papers and has spoken at conferences in the US, the United Kingdom, and Germany. He has published articles on hardware, software, and business topics. Hardware topics include peer reviewed IEEE articles on microcode. Software articles have dealt with the application of automated processes with a focus on legacy tool integrations and tool migrations. As the principal provider of Perforce related services for VIZIM Worldwide, Neal's focus is on the migration of information between SCM products and integrations with legacy systems. He developed the framework for VIZIM's full history migration tool sets and authored the ClearCase and VSS-specifi c versions of those tools. He has created many Perforce-specifi c integrations for features such as the Perforce Defect Tracking gateway and IDEs such as JDeveloper.