Evolution Is Essential for Software Tool Development

We examine the problems encountered in evolving software development tools, in particular, configuration management tools, drawing on our experience in producing the DaSC configuration management toolset. Building good software development tools is a time-consuming, iterative process where the tool designers must take into account the evolving nature of the software development process embodied in the tools, the evolving nature of the environment in which the tools exist, and the evolving understanding that the tool designers have of the users of the tools. We believe that our experience with the tools that we have developed is applicable to other kinds of tools used in industrial settings.