OEM file naming and control

I work as a programmer at an OEM, where 95% of our product is either custom or highly tailored. We are growing into a multi-programmer house. We have PLC and HMI code which is developed and deployed and, often, revised. As there are more of us working on different stages of these projects, coordination and control of source is becoming increasingly important. We do have secure, backed-up network storage. Most of our jobs use Rockwell/Allen Bradley Logix500 & Logix5000 based controls. I am curious as to how people handle the following:

1. How is deployed versus development code identified?
2. Is there a way to easily identify the version of code being run on the target machine?
3. Do you use some form of revision control and code locking?
4. How do you handle portable computers, memorie sticks and the like, all life savers but hard to keep track of, revision wise?

The projects typically are around 100 I/O and have a programming cycle of about two weeks and the field revisions as customer requirements evolve.


I appreciate any input!

Karl

Currently, our plant utilizes a software called

Serena Version Control Manager.

Rockwell has their own version of this type of software, but our budget was not nearly as large as what we would have liked.

Serena is a scaled down, more open concept control-file software vault.

Go to the website

http://www.serena.com/products/pvcs/index.html

Works Ok, have not had issues thus far.

We use Factory Talk Asset Center.

Haven't used anything else but it will retain all prior revisions of code and you have the ability to pull it up if you need it.

You can also Check Out whilst you are updating it.

I'm sure this is standard for most asset management programs so you'd have to try different brands to compare features, especially if you want something that will allow you to keep dev work separate from issued revisions.

I'm enjoying these responses!

Do you embed anything in the target code so that there is an indication of the revision level, e.g. hard code a word to represent a revision number?

With FT Asset Center, I believe upon Check In any difference in the file (through a CheckSum maybe?) is detected and will automatically up the Rev.

In our case the Asset Center Rev number and the actual rev (as assigned by the engineers) don't match, so we completely ignore the Asset Center rev number. Fortunately there is a Comment field where would would put something like:

"Software XXX archived as Version X.XX per Whatever" (We keep the actual rev numer as a comment in the code).

Unfortunately I don't think there is a way to change the way Asset Center archives the version numbers. It starts a 1 and for each change increments the version in whole numbers).

We use RSMACC (Rockwell Software Maintenance Automation Control Centre) but are upgrading to Factory Talk

Asset Center has it quirks. It was a pain to install, for me anyways. But if you use a lot AB / Rockwell stuff it integrates nicely.

We're Toolkit users. Yes AB software can be quirky, but it hasn't let us down yet. We're working on standardising our commenting &c, too, so I think we can adopt that practice.