Software Configuration Management

Abstract

Software Configuration Management (SCM) concerns the control of the evolution of complex software systems. CM is one of the most successful Software Engineering research fields with respect to acceptance in the industry. Almost any development organization that releases software applications and/or supplies complete software intensive systems, can only survive with the right attention to Configuration Management. The importance of SCM is also addressed by software process improvement models, such as CMM, CMMI and SPICE, in which SCM processes play a major role in achieving an initial level of maturity. During the last three decades, SCM has emerged towards a mature Software Engineering discipline. During these years, several topics in SCM have been researched and their results are currently common in the available SCM tools. Software development is changing, which implies that aspects of SCM should correspondingly change over time to serve new software development needs. For example, model driven engineering is a growing field that also requires different SCM support. Another example of concern is the growth of software code bases that require extra tool support during maintenance (in order to find the correct information). In this special issue of the Science of Computer Programming we present two excellent papers that are related to given examples in new areas of research. In this introduction, we provide a short overview of SCM. Furthermore, we present SCM in the perspective of the changing world of Software Engineering. Challenges in SCM are discussed to trigger new research in the SCM field. The SCM workshop is the main workshop in this field, so we provide a short historical overview of this also.