Software Technology in a Networked Computer Environment: Configuration Management in Software Design and Development Teams

The software design and development require cooperation and communication among all the professionals involved in the processes. Some activities are carried out individually, and some are usually collaborative tasks, such as the establishment of an overall system architecture, the distribution of system functionality and of activities, and the responsibilities within the design and development processes, the definition and implementation of sub-system interfaces, the testing and maintaining the implemented software applications, the finding out of better design and development methods and supporting tools. This paper is based on case-studies of work practices in two software development teams. The main focus is on development as a cooperative activity. In particular configuration management (CM) builds the main focus of the investigations as a method (and a tool) to support different phases of software design and development. CM running on a networked computer environment is concerned with creating consistent descriptions of how different parts of a software modules fit together, with controlling bug reports, change requests and design changes, with creating and managing different versions of a system.