Software Configuration Management - Definition
Filed Under Techniques, Review, Terms, Process, Development, Software | Posted on November 1, 2007
One definition of Software Configuration Management is a set of activities designed to control change by identifying the work products that are likely to change, establishing relationships among them, defining mechanisms for managing different versions of these work products, controlling the changes imposed, and auditing and reporting on the changes made. In other words, SCM is a methodology to control and manage a software development project.
Another definition talks about tracking and control of software development and its activities. That is, the mangement of software development projects with respect to issues such as multiple developers working on the same code at the same time, targetting multiple platforms, supporting multiple versions, and controlling the status of code (for example beta test versus real release). Even within that scope there are different schools of thought:
* Traditional Configuration Management - checkin/checkout control of sources (and sometimes binaries) and the ability to perform builds (or compiles) of the entities. Other functions may be included as well.
* Process Management - control of the software development activities. For example, it might check to ensure that a change request existed and had been approved for fixing and that the associated design, documentation, and review activities have been completed before allowing the code to be “checked in” again.
Yet another definition of SCM: Software configuration management (SCM) is a set of activities that are designed to control change by identifying the work products that are likely to change, establishing relationships among them, defining mechanisms for managing different versions of these work products, controlling changes that are imposed, and auditing and reporting on the changes that are made.
Software Configuration Management has been called differently by different companies. Some of the terms used for Software Configuration Management include:
- Source Configuration Management
- Revision Control
- Change Management
- Configuration Item
- Baseline (configuration management)
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