Configuration Management for Reusable Software

This paper discusses the configuration management of reusable software, and proposes an architecture that incorporates configuration management with a software library. Introduction Software configuration management concerns monitoring and controlling changes to software. This paper discusses configuration management of reusable software assets, drawing on previous work on configuration management for traditional software engineering [Frakes et. al. 91]. Configuration management has three major activities: • Version control. Reusable software components, like any software product, will have versions because of error fixes and enhancements. To build a system using these assets, one needs to know which version to use. Old versions of assets must be recoverable for reference, and so they can be used to make corrections and enhancements. As software assets change, they form successive versions. Version control is the activity of keeping track of these versions. • Change control. Change control is the procedure for requesting changes, deciding what changes to make, making changes, and recording and verifying changes. Changes to reusable assets in a library cannot be made haphazardly, but must be made under a controlled process. • Build control. Keeping track of which versions of work products go together to form a release, and generating derived assets and systems correctly, is called build control. Build control for reuse has two aspects. One is the general specification of which versions of assets to use in a system build. The other aspect is that reusable assets may themselves be composites of other items, so specifications of how to build assets may also be required. We discuss each of these activities in turn as it relates to reusable components..