Fine-grained Software Configuration Management for the Sysiphus Unified Software Engineering Model

Software con guration management is widely accepted today as an essential factor for the success of any software development project. Many di erent types of artifacts are created and need to be managed during the life cycle of a software project. These range from source code to requirements, analysis and design documents and models, test cases and collaboration artifacts such as captured rationale. Current mainstream software con guration management systems are geared towards managing source code on the basis of les and lines. This approach is not adequate for software con guration management of the complex internal structures that many of the artifacts enumerated above exhibit. Furthermore, these systems fail to manage the many interdependencies between these di erent artifacts. The work presented in this thesis addresses this problem by developing a software con guration management system for sets of strongly interconnected software engineering artifacts with complex internal structures. The work is based on the Sysiphus project model which integrates di erent system, organizational and collaboration models to provide a uni ed view of the artifacts created during a software development project. In this thesis, we establish the requirements for such a system and present a ne grained approach to software con guration management that combines operation based deltas, change packages and product versioning to meet these requirements. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we have implemented the proposed software con guration management system by extending the Sysiphus tool suite.