Spectrum of Functionality in Configuration Management Systems

The Software Environments Project at the Software Engineering Institute has found considerable progress concerning support for software configuration management (CM) in environments and tools. This paper’s intent is to highlight a spectrum of features provided by existing CM systems. The spectrum shows features as being extensions or generalizations of other features and these extensions represent the progress. As part of presenting the features, the scope of issues concerning users of CM systems is discussed. No single CM system provides all the functionality required by the different kinds of users of CM systems. Rather, each CM system addresses some part of a spectrum of functionality. To complete the report, several configuration management systems are briefly described.