An Object-Oriented Approach to Software Configuration Management

Abstract

Software configuration management is the discipline of managing the evolution of complex software systems. Such systems consist of a large number of components which may have many versions. The software components belong to various categories e.g. requirements specifications, design specifications, source code modules, object code modules, test plans, test data etc. Current software configuration management systems handle only a limited set of these categories. Most of them handle only source code components and their object code counterparts. A new approach to software configuration management that uses an object-oriented data model is presented in this paper. A prototype system has been implemented that is based on this approach. This system is called EMP_SCMS and is capable of handling all categories of software components.