3.5 Summary

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This chapter presented an overview of SCM, ranging from its history to current trends. We learned that SCM was initially associated mostly with manual routines and tools only supporting versioning. However, today’s SCM tools are highly automatic and really support much of the daily work of developers and at the same time provide managers with information for project management.

Nine important areas, referred to as basic functions, in which SCM normally provides support were also described:

1. Version management —making it possible to store, retrieve, and compare versions and variants of a document;

2. Configuration selection —providing functions to create and select associated versions (or branches) of different documents;

3. Concurrent development —controlling simultaneous access by several users, either by preventing it or by supporting it;

4. Distributed development —by means of which geographically dispersed developers can work concurrently on a project;

5. Build management —providing mechanisms for building software, preferably without unnecessary rebuilding;

6. Release management —packaging software in a form suitable for distribution and generating documentation to enable users and developers to keep track of changes included in the product release;

7. Workspace management —providing a private sandbox for each user in which the user can work in isolation, remaining under the control of the SCM tool;

8. Change management —keeping track of changes introduced in the product and providing support for the process of entering and implementing changes in the products;

9. Integration with other tools —ways that SCM tools are often integrated with the development environment and with other tools.

Two large domains related to SCM were also described briefly— document management and CM. CM is the basis of SCM, which was developed by adding specialized support for software to CM.

Finally in this chapter, certain trends were highlighted. These included the influence of WWW on SCM, how to manage all the items on the Web, and how to utilize WWW for SCM purposes.

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