A model for versioning control mechanism in component-based systems

Abstract

Component-based systems provide a better reuse of software components, greater flexibility, scalability and higher quality of services. Component development generally takes place due to the process of creating and propagating changes in requirement definitions, system designs, program source code, documentation and test data. As a result, multiple versions of constituent components come into existence. Thus, there is a need to keep the track of multiple versions of same component. To handle multiple versions of constituent components, a version-control tool named as Visual Version Control Tool (VVCT), for the management of life-cycle evolution of component, is developed. The developed tool satisfies all the conditions required for version control in component-based systems. The parameters required for uniform version management as well as component frameworks are also satisfied by the developed tool. To monitor and control the versioning system, an example model is tested along with the set of proposed metrics. This paper also incorporates issues like component configuration, component evolution, component framework, component version tree and version-control metrics.