Object-Oriented Software Configuration Management

Abstract

The ability to manage the evolution of a software system is critical to a successful development process. In a typical software development process, software engineers think and reason in terms of logical abstractions, their compositions and interrelations. However, existing version control and software configuration management (SCM) systems treat a software system as a set of files in a conventional file system. This creates an impedance mismatch between the design and implementation domain (semantic level) and the configuration management domain (file level). File-oriented SCM systems, whose concepts are heavily based on the storage structure, can become burdensome for developers partly because design/implementation methods and SCM infrastructures require different mental models. This paper describes Molhado (Nguyen, 2005; Nguyen et al., 2004; Nguyen et al., 2005), an extensible and adaptable SCM framework and infrastructure that helps developers quickly create the core of an object-oriented SCM system for any application domain independent of the concrete file structure. SCM systems based on Molhado can be built to operate entirely at the logical level, eliminating that impedance mismatch