Context-Preserving Software Configuration Management

This paper presents a model for version control and configuration management with high emphasis on the ability to recreate the relevant context for a given part of a software design structure. The approach is termed context-preserving software configuration management. The context-preserving approach provides distributed, dynamic, configuration descriptions under full version control, enhances overview of relations between versions, lessens the selection problem, and conceptually provides a version concept that can match the logical design entities closely. Presently the context-preserving approach is used in a software development environment research project, “Ragnarok” [8], as the fundamental software configuration management layer. A prototype that implements a command-line user interface to the context-preserving layer is outlined as well as results from on-going experiments in which the prototype is used in a number of real development projects.