Software production problems have forced industrial organizations to assess the disciplines used to manage the software process in practice. Configuration management (CM) appears to be one of the software process activities that requires improvements. The importance of configuration management is clearly understood in industry, but there is yet no clear roadmap on how to proceed when improving CM practices. One of the biggest problems is that most organizations have considerable existing software assets to be maintained. Almost invariably this software has been produced using a large number of different methods, languages and tools, which makes its configuration management difficult. Taking into account that new software has to be developed all the time, systematic procedures for evolving industrial software configuration management schemes are needed. We have developed an incremental approach to building CM environments, which has been evaluated and applied in cooperation with several industrial embedded systems manufacturers. In this paper, we describe the approach and the experiences in using it in various embedded computer system applications, such as mechatronic machines, and space instruments. Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 11, © 1995 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517 112 Software Quality Management