Software Configuration Management

Geometric decorationStatistics:

  • 53% of software projects overrun their schedules and budgets
  • 31% are cancelled
  • Only 16% are completed
  • Projects made by large American software companies approximate to only 42% of clients’ requests.

Source: Keyes, J. (2004). Software Configuration Management. Boca Raton: Auerbach

SCM basic tasks:

Development and production of:

  • Configuration identification
  • Configuration change control
  • Configuration status accounting
  • Configuration auditis

Integration: consists on putting together the individual software parts in one single big project.

Types:

  • Merge: parallel development on the same stuff
  • Assembly: development of different pieces

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Software Configuration Management started in the 1950s, when configuration management, that was used for hardware and production control, was applied in software development.

Nearly all components that comprise modern information technology, such as Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) environments, Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) engines, Warehouses, EII, and Business Intelligence (BI), contain a great deal of metadata as well as his own repository and designer. That’s why metadata CM activities must be used in order to have effective information management.

The purpose of Software Configuration Management is to establish and maintain the integrity of the products of the software project throughout the project’s software life cycle. Software Configuration Management involves identifying configuration items for the software project, controlling these configuration items and changes to them, and recording and reporting status and change activity for these configuration ítems.

Configuration Management is practiced in one or another form as part of any software engineering project where several individuals or organizations have to coordinate their activities.

Software Engineering Institute. Capability Maturity Model Integration, Version 1.1 CMMI for Systems Engineering and Software Engineering (CMMI-SE/SW, V1.1) (CMU/SEI-2000-TR-018, ADA388775). Pittsburgh, PA: Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2000.

The reason for using SCM system is to keep track of the changing entities of a software product in

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