A T Estbed for Connguration Management P Olicy Programming

Even though the number and variety of available con guration management systems has grown rapidly in the past few years, the need for new con guration management systems still remains. Driving this need are the emergence of situations requiring highly specialized solutions, the demand for management of artifacts other than traditional source code, and the exploration of wholely new research questions in con guration management. Complicating the picture is the trend toward organizational structures that involve personnel working at physically separate sites. We have developed a testbed to support the rapid development of con guration management systems. The testbed separates con guration management repositories (i.e., the stores for versions of artifacts) from con guration management policies (i.e., the procedures according to which the versions are manipulated) by providing a generic model of a distributed repository and an associated programmatic interface. Speci c con guration management policies are programmed as unique extensions to the generic interface, while the underlying distributed repository is reused across di erent policies. In this paper, we describe the repository model and its interface, and present our experience in using a prototype of the testbed, called NUCM, to implement a variety of con guration management systems. This work was supported in part by the Air Force Materiel Command, Rome Laboratory, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency under Contract Numbers F30602-94-C-0253 and F30602-98-2-0163. The content of the information does not necessarily re ect the position or the policy of the Government and no o cial endorsement should be inferred.