Software Configuration Management (scm)

Software Configuration Objects

The SCM process

• How does an organization identify and manage the many existing versions of a program in a manner that will enable change to be accommodated efficiently?
• How does an organization control changes before and after software is released to a customer?
• Who has responsibility for approving and prioritizing changes?
• How can we assure that changes have been made properly?
• What mechanism is used to appraise others of changes that are made?

… these questions lead to the definition of 5 SCM tasks

5 SCM tasks

• Identification
• Version control
• Change control
• Configuration auditing
• Status reporting

The SCM Process

Version Control

• Combines procedures and tools to manage the different versions of configuration objects created during the software process
• An entity is composed of objects at the same revision level
• A variant is a different set of objects at the same revision level and coexists with other variants
• A new version is defined when major changes have been made to one or more objects

Version Control

• A version control system is directly integrated with four major capabilities:
• a project database (repository) that stores all relevant configuration objects
• a version management capability that stores all versions of a configuration object
• a make facility that enables the software engineer to collect all relevant configuration objects and construct a specific version of the software.
• an issues tracking (also called bug tracking) capability that enables the team to record and track the status of all outstanding issues associated with each configuration object.

Change Control

• Change request
• submitted and evaluated to assess technical merit and impact on the other configuration objects and budget
• Change report
• contains the results of the evaluation
• Change control authority (CCA)
• makes the final decision on the status and priority of the change based on the change report