An experience in introducing configuration management in a process-centered software engineering environment

Configuration Management (CM) is widely recognized as one of the key practices in software development, specially as far as the development of big and complex software systems is concerned. Therefore, tools supporting CM have been constantly evolving, and are now sophisticated software products, providing many features, including the possibility to model-to some extent-the work-flow concerning the configuration items. Process-Centered Software Engineering Environments (PSEEs) aim at providing development environments where production activities are carried out according to a given model of the software process. Since CM has a fundamental role in any software process, it is interesting to understand to what extent a PSEE can be used to support a process model which includes CM issues, and to compare the PSEE-based environments with state-of-the-art commercial CM tools. The work described here is a first step towards this goal, concerning the development of a specific CM environment (featuring a subset of the functionalities provided by CCC/Harvest) based on the SPADE PSEE. The results reported can however be generalized to several CM tools and PSEEs.