Software Configuration Management (SCM) is an important discipline in professional software development and maintenance. The importance of SCM has increased as programs have become larger, more long lasting, and more mission and life critical. This article discusses the evolution of SCM technology from the early days of software development to the present, with a particular emphasis on the impact that university and industrial research has had along the way. Based on an analysis of the publication history and evolution in functionality of the available SCM systems, we trace the critical ideas in the field from their early inception to their eventual maturation in commercially and freely available SCM systems. In doing so, this article creates a detailed record of the critical value of SCM research and illustrates how research results have shaped the functionality of today's SCM systems.

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Status of this Memo This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

This paper describes research associated with the development and evaluation of Odin-an environment integration system based on the idea that tools should be integrated around a centralized store of persistent software objects. The paper describes this idea in detail and then presents the Odin architecture, which features such notions as the typing of software objects, composing tools out of modular tool fragments, optimizing the storage and rederivation of software objects, and isolating tool interconnectivity information in a single centralized object. The paper then describes some projects that have used Odin to integrate tools on a large scale. Finally, it discusses the significance of this work and the conclusions that can be drawn about superior software environment architectures.A primary goal of software environment research is to devise superior development and maintenance processes and effectively integrate software tools to support them. The development of a large software system can easily cost between $50 and $400 per line [l], yet the quality of the end product is often disturbingly low. The cost of maintaining such systems over their lifetime usually far exceeds original development costs. Further, software costs have been steadily increasing over the past decade. Most observers blame the twin problems of high cost and low quality on the lack of orderly, systematic processes for developing software and the lack of software tools that effectively exploit computing power to support them. Accordingly, there has been much work on software tools and processes during the past decade. There have been some proposed software processes that stress extensive documentation of software products. Often these are not widely

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