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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.