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.
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.
