As reuse of software components becomes more commonplace, being able to understand, manipulate and reason about software system architectures acquires new importance. Although commercial software development environments have addressed many of the issues of con guration management, there is still a need for visual formalisms that can aid in representing and manipulating architectures of softwar...

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 ...

This paper discusses the configuration management of reusable software, and proposes an architecture that incorporates configuration management with a software library. Introduction Software configuration management concerns monitoring and controlling changes to software. This paper discusses configuration management of reusable software assets, drawing on previous work on configuration managem...

This paper presents an overview of the knowledge area of software configuration management (SCM) for the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) project. A breakdown of topics is presented for the knowledge area along with a succinct description of each topic. References are given to materials that provide more in-depth coverage of the key areas of software configuration ma...

More and more systems are developed using components. There is a move from monolithic to open and flexible systems. In such systems, components are upgraded and introduced at run-time, which affects the configuration of the complete system. Keeping up-to-date information about which components are installed is a problem. Updating a component also affects the compatibility of the system. It is t...

Configuration management in today’s data centers is largely a human activity. Where automation does exist it is usually implemented by centralized management tools that coordinate configuration actions across the entire infrastructure and applications. These systems are limited in scale, reliability, and security. We propose that dependable service configuration management is more naturally imp...

Refactoring tools allow programmers to change source code much quicker than before. However, the complexity of these changes cause versioning tools that operate at a file level to lose the history of components. This problem can be solved by semantic, operation-based SCM with persistent IDs. We propose that versioning tools be aware of the program entities and the refactoring operations. Molhad...

Although there are countless tools to track and manage the configuration of large numbers of Unix systems, there seems to be a lack of tools to manage the interaction and dependencies between systems. As our site has grown, many machines provide services that are required for the operation of other machines and applications. We have been unable to maintain accurate lists of services and servers...

System configuration management is difficult because systems evolve in an undisciplined way: packages are upgraded, configuration files are edited, and so on. The management of existing operating systems is strongly imperative in nature, since software packages and configuration data (e.g., /bin and /etc in Unix) can be seen as imperative data structures: they are updated in-place by system adm...

Integration of configuration management (CM) tools into software development environments raises the need for CM models to interoperate through a unified CM model. We present the version set model, where versions, components, and aggregates are grouped into sets according to their features, using feature logic as a formal base to denote sets and operations and deduce consistency. Version sets g...