Configuration Management support for Distributed Software Development

In an ever more globalized world, there are many advantages from doing distributed development. However, geographically distributed development is generally recognized as being much more challenging than traditional co-located development and therefore companies are often hesitant to “go distributed”. Configuration management is a basic service that provides the infrastructure for projects and organizations. In this paper, we analyse the role that configuration management can play in the context of distributed software development. From a configuration management point of view a good part of the challenges from distributed development can be dealt with by applying traditional configuration management concepts and techniques, many challenges can be alleviated by extended support from configuration management – and then there is a group of challenges left that will have to be dealt with in other ways.