7.5 ECTS Configuration Management

Perforce lab exercises:

When&where you feel like it - but your lab reports have to be in no later than Friday, November 24 at midnight.

You can get help to get started:

Friday, November 17, 8-10 or 10-12.
Place: in E:2116.

Just like the CVS lab - and the git lab - the Perforce lab is timeboxed. This means that I would like you to spend a total of 10 hours on the lab and report. Indicatively you could spend 1 hour on preparing well for the lab, 6 hours for carrying out the lab experiments and 3 hours writing up the lab report.

Literature

Perforce lab instructions.
Enhbom, Hasselgren, Nilsson, Svensson: The Evaluation of Configuration Management Version Control Tools, Department of Computer Science, Lund University, Sweden, June 18, 2004.
Read this paper before the lab and use it as inspiration for what new things you could experiment with (in addition to the scenarios from the CVS lab) - and bring it to the git labs too.

Useful links:

Frequently Asked Questions about the Perforce lab
Source code (src1-project) that you will work on for this lab

This time you will "investigate and explore" Perforce. For some things it is quite similar to CVS - for other things it is more or less different. You should go through the same scenarios as you did for the CVS labs to discover the similarities and differences (so don't forget to bring also your CVS lab description and notes). You should also spend some time on additional exploration of Perforce beyond the CVS scenarios.

You have six hours to get through the scenarios and the extended experimentation and exploration. At the end you have to write a 3-5 page document (in two parts) that you email to the lecturer (for more details, see the lab instructions).

Lab preparation:

In preparation for the Perforce labs, you should read quickly through:

"Introducing Perforce"

before the lab to get some idea of how Perforce works and the slightly different terminology they use. You may also want to very quickly browse through:

"P4V User Guide"

though this is more suited as a tutorial, following the examples when you get started with Perforce.

In general you can browse the Perforce web site (perforce.com) - it contains much documentation and tutorial videos. Be aware that the university has not bought support for Perforce, so you are "on your own". If you find some useful documentation (or videos) on the Perforce site - or elsewhere - please report it to the lecturer.

Bring also your CVS lab instructions and notes with you as you are going to need them for these labs too - as well as the paper The Evaluation of Configuration Management Version Control Tools.

Finally, you should not forget that you have to report your results in a written document that has to be emailed to the lecturer (bendix@cs.lth.se). Since your lab report is subject to Student Peer Assessment, you must remember to:

State your group number - and the names and emails of all group members in your report.
Write your report in English.
Send only one report for the whole group even if you do the experiments in pairs.

Your reports must be in no later than Friday, November 24 at midnight.

Updated November 7, 2023