DONATE:2012 What Version are You On? Poster Presentation by Jackie

ABSTRACT

What Version are You On?. An Investigation into Software Configuration Management.

Software Configuration Management (SCM) is the essential control tool in the software development process. Software design, implementation and deployment can follow an infinite number of paths; add to that the arrival of issues and change requests, and the need for a control process becomes paramount. SCM allows for the identification of configuration items, the ability to attach a version to each item and the production of specific collections of items for testing and release. As SCM has the ability to recover items from previous versions, it becomes a powerful tool for auditing the development process. For the spring 2012 Donate project development, SCM provided the development control using open source utilities. Configuration items and maintenance of the work products is achieved with the use of Subversion Tortoise SCM and the central repository hosting service provided by Google code. Weekly tag releases are created off the development trunk, having merged in the separated development branches that were updated for the iteration. Awareness on behalf of the developers, for the complexities of SCM and its benefits was achieved.

Poster