Impact of software engineering research on the practice of software configuration management

Abstract

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.

On porting software visualization tools to the web

“…Virtually all software is nowadays built in a collaborative fashion. This ranges from the usage of software configuration management systems (SCM) supporting distributed development, now widely used in practice [18], awareness tools to prevent upcoming conflicts [50], to fully integrated solutions such as IBM's Jazz [21].…”

Substitutability-Based Version Propagation to Manage the Evolution of Three-Level Component-Based Architectures

“…One of the main issues of software evolution management is the versioning activity [11]. One needs to keep track of changes in software not only during software programming but all along its complete life-cycle, including early development stages such as specification or postdeployment phases such as maintenance.…”

A Difference Calculus for Structured Data

“…Traditionally, SCM systems rely on existing diff tools which are limited in their scope [4], for example, the Revision Control System (RCS) [5] is built on the UNIX diff utility. Some other diff tools have been developed for other common data structures, such as XML files [6] or spreadsheet files [7,8].…”