It also supports design-data management of electronic design artifacts, thus enabling hardware and software co-development.

ClearCase includes revision control and forms the basis for configuration management at large and medium-sized businesses, accommodating projects with hundreds or thousands of developers.

It also supports extensive process automation and enforcement using triggers, attributes, hyperlinks, and other metadata.

This metadata can be used for generating SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials) and is important in regulated environments where artifact traceability is essential.

Some of the Atria developers had worked on an earlier, similar system: DSEE (Domain Software Engineering Environment) from Apollo Computer.

In September 2016, IBM announced a strategic partnership [11] with HCL Technologies that will allow for accelerated development.

In ClearCase terminology, an individual database is called a VOB (Versioned Object Base).

[13] The most important service is the Atria location Broker Daemon (ALBD), which manages all (LAN) communication between computers.

A distinguishing feature of ClearCase is the MultiVersion File System (MVFS), a proprietary networked filesystem which can mount VOBs as a virtual file system through a dynamic view, selecting a consistent set of versions and enabling the production of derived objects.

Instead, a snapshot view stores a copy of the VOB data locally on the user's computer.

The dynamic and snapshot view types are supported by the ClearCase local client (CCLC).

Both are copy-based, but the automatic view uses the MVFS to support local, shareable pools of VOB objects.

Under base ClearCase, each view is controlled by its associated configuration specification, commonly referred to as a config spec.

To determine which version, if any, of an element should be visible, ClearCase traverses the configuration specification line-by-line from top to bottom, stopping when a match is found and ignoring any subsequent rules.

The configuration record can be used to create another view that shows all files that have been previously read during the build time.

The shareable derived objects are physically present in the VOB server, not in the views that reference them.

This feature is called winking in derived objects and requires that the clearmake or omake tool is used for builds.

ClearCase dynamic views are slower than local filesystems, even with a good network infrastructure.

Originally, ClearCase supported only full ("fat") clients running native on Unix and Windows.

ClearCase is also integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio, Cadence Virtuoso, and the Eclipse IDE through a plugin.