Decision-Oriented Configuration Management

Abstract

Configuration management is a software process intended to capture the objectives of version management and configuration control, and to relate programming-in-the-large to in-the-small and in-the-many. This chapter presents the conceptual model of configuration management deployed in DAIDA. The configuration model separates conceptual from document-based version and configuration management, by focusing on careful modeling of design decisions as a unifying concept to describe versioning, configuration, and mapping tasks. Besides describing the model, we report on a prototype implementation and on experiences in a real-world case study. Although version management and configuration control is the chief task of the proposed decision-oriented configuration model, it also serves as a platform for group process management in the cooperation among multiple software engineers.

This work was mainly done during the author’s dissertation at the University of Passau under supervision of Matthias Jarke. The implementation of the approach would have never happened without the commitment of Michael Gocek, Carlos Maltzahn, and Hans Nissen. Support was provided by the program “Objectbanks for Experts” of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant Ja-445/l-2). The author is now supported by the Canadian Federal Networks of Excellence programme through the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS).