Concepts in configuration management systems

Abstract

There has been considerable progress concerning support for software configuration management (CM) in environments and tools. This paper’s intent is to highlight the user concepts provided by existing CM systems. These are shown as a spectrum. In the spectrum, concepts are seen as extensions to, or generalizations of, other concepts. There is difficulty associated with extracting concepts from CM systems since there is no commonality in terminology concerning CM functionality throughout the software engineering community and many CM systems implement variations on concepts. As a result, each concept presented is described as it exists in one particular CM system. A part of highlighting the concepts involves discussing the scope of issues important to users of CM systems. No single CM system provides all the functionality required by the different kinds of users of CM systems. Rather, each CM system addresses some part of the spectrum of concepts. To complete the report, the CM capabilities of the systems used as examples are briefly described.