A study of configuration management in open source software projects

Projects where developers are geographically distributed and with high personnel turnover are usually considered to be hard to manage. Any organisation that successfully handles such projects merits closer analysis so that lessons can be learned and good practice disseminated. Open Source Software projects represent such a case. One important factor is good configuration management practices. In this paper, the authors examine the configuration management process for some Open Source Software projects and analyse how process, tool support, and people aspects of configuration management contribute to this success. Finally, we discuss best practices and how lessons learned from Open Source Software can be transferred to more traditional ways of developing software.