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The State of Automated Configuration Management


Title: The State of Automated Configuration Management

Author(s): A. Brown, S. Dart, P. Feiler, K. Wallnau

Number: Annual Technical Review September 1991

Abstract: Software configuration management (CM) has received, and will continue to receive, a great deal of attention from the software engineering community. CM is an essential part of the software process. It is viewed as a control discipline that brings stability to the evolution of a software product that is developed and maintained by project teams. This is reflected in the widely recognized SEI software process maturity model. In this model, CM is considered a key process improvement area in order to move from level one to level two. To assist in this, automated CM capabilities are needed, making CM a key component of a software development environment (SDE). A large number of commercial products offer CM support. These products range from stand-alone tools running on multiple platforms, to CM services in environment frameworks and in CASE tools. Through automation, CM becomes not only a support function for management, but also support for developers.

The focus of this article is tool support for CM. Its main purpose is to give the reader an analysis and summary of the state of CM automation. It ends with our vision for the need of a set of commonly understood CM services. This includes the ability to integrate these CM services to allow sharing between, and greater integration of, development tools.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Configuration Management
    • Definition of Configuration Management
    • Roles of CM Users and Views of CM
    • Requirements for Automated CM Facilities
  • Configuration Management Concepts
    • What is a CM System?
    • Spectrum of Concepts in CM Systems
      • Component Concepts
        • Repository
        • Distributed Component
      • Structure and Construction Concepts
        • Change Set
        • System Modelling
        • Subsystem
        • Object Pool
        • Attribution
        • Consistency Maintenance
      • Team Concepts
        • Workspace
        • Transparent View
        • Transaction
      • Process Concepts
        • Context Management
        • Contract
        • Change Request
        • Lifecycle Model
    • Summary and Analysis of the Spectrum
  • CM Systems
    • Four CM Paradigms
      • The Checkout/Checkin Paradigm
      • The Composition Paradigm
      • The Long Transaction Paradigm
      • The Change Set Paradigm
    • Characterization of CM Systems
  • Integration of CM and CASE Tools
    • CM Services in Software Environments: A Question of Integration
    • Current State of Integration Technology
      • IPSE Integration
        • Advantages of IPSE Integration
        • Limitations of IPSE Integration
      • Coalition Integration
        • Advantages of Coalition Integration
        • Limitations of Coalition Integration
    • Summary of CASE and CM Integration
  • Conclusions and Our Vision for the Future
    • Towards a Federated Architecture
    • Summary
Postscript Acrobat scm home
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and operated by Carnegie Mellon University.

Copyright 2007 by Carnegie Mellon University
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URL: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/legacy/scm/abstracts/absatr_cm_state.html
Last Modified: 11 January 2007