Jacky Estublier

Software configuration management: a roadmap

This paper, in the first chapter summarizes the state of the art in SCM, showing the evolution along the last 25 years. Chapter 2 shows the current issues and current research work under way in the area. In chapter 3, the challenges SCM has to take up, as well as SCM future research are discussed.

Impact of software engineering research on the practice of software configuration management

Software Configuration Management (SCM) is an important discipline in professional software development and maintenance. The importance of SCM has increased as programs have become larger, more long lasting, and more mission and life critical. This article discusses the evolution of SCM technology from the early days of software development to the present, with a particular emphasis on the impact that university and industrial research has had along the way. Based on an analysis of the publication history and evolution in functionality of the available SCM systems, we trace the critical ideas in the field from their early inception to their eventual maturation in commercially and freely available SCM systems. In doing so, this article creates a detailed record of the critical value of SCM research and illustrates how research results have shaped the functionality of todays SCM systems.

Apel: A Graphical Yet Executable Formalism forProcess Modeling

Software process improvement requires high level formalisms for describing project-specific, organizational and quality aspects. These formalisms must be convenient not only for capture but also for execution purposes. In order to fulfill these requirements and to build a software process environment capable of supporting engineering tasks we have designed a new graphical, but still enactable, formalism called APEL (for Abstract Process Engine Language). APEL is very ambitious in the sense that it aims to cover a wide spectrum of needs and approaches expressed not only in the software engineering field but also in many others such as real-time systems, object-oriented methodologies, tool integration, CSCW, workflow and information systems. It is then not surprising to see that many concepts and techniques used in APEL are borrowed from these connected fields. A major outcome of the work presented here was to integrate a broad range of concepts and paradigms in a single and coherent framework, but on the basis of a minimal set of primitive concepts which make it very easy to extend. Globally, the aspects which received most attention are: openness, reuse, scalability, human orientation and cooperative work.

Reuse and variability in large software applications

Reuse has always been a major goal in software engineering, since it promises large gains in productivity, quality and time to market reduction. Practical experience has shown that substantial reuse has only successfully happened in two cases: libraries, where many generic and small components can be found; and product lines, where domains-specific components can be assembled in different ways to produce variations of a given product.In this paper we examine how product lines have successfully achieved reuse of coarse-grained components, and the underlying factors limiting this approach to narrowly scoped domains. We then build on this insight to present an approach, called software federation, which proposes a mechanism to overcome the identified limitations, and therefore makes reuse of coarse-grained components possible over a larger range of applications. Our approach extends and generalizes the product line approach, extending the concepts and mechanisms available to manage variability. The system is in use in different companies, validating the claims made in this paper.

Experience with a data base of programs

The Adele system was initially designed as a specialized data base of programs for an experimental Pascal environment, with a focus on configuration management. Later, it was redesigned as a general data base for large scale programs written in any language. The focus here was on side effect control and real problems of large industrial software products [Estublier84]. Then in a third stage Adele evolved into the kernel for programming environments and was developed as an industrial product, with emphasis on portability, flexibility, distribution, control of rights and on the structure of the software products [Belkhatir86]. This paper describes the experience gained in the use of the Adele data base of programs.1

Toward SCM / PDM Integration?

Software Configuration Management (SCM) is the discipline of controlling the evolution of a software product. Product Data Management (PDM) is the disciple of designing and controlling the evolution of a product design. For a long time, these two domains have been disconnected, but they probably share common concepts and techniques. Furthermore, any large product development includes a substantial (and growing) part of software development. There is a need to control the evolution of both the product and its associated software. Thus we are faced with the question: are the involved concepts and techniques close enough to envision a common tool capable of supporting both domains. This paper tries to answer this question, through an analysis of the PDM standard STEP and tools characteristic of both domains: Metaphase for PDM; Clear Case and Adele for SCM.

Process model and awareness in SCM

The development of large and complex systems, under hard time constraints, requires the participation of many developers working concurrently. SCM systems allow concurrent access to software artifacts, but provide poor support to maintain data consistency when concurrent changes are performed on the same artifacts. This problem can be reduced if developers are aware of the others work and warned about the conflicts that may arise, allowing the users to manage the risks more effectively.Awareness, without any knowledge about the cooperative process and system models cannot help much, and indeed is not very much used today. We claim that awareness takes its potential only when it takes into account the cooperative process, and the system model in use. This paper, based on the experience gained with our tool Celine, explores the relationships between awareness, process and system models, and shows how the knowledge of these models can be used to improve the relevance of an awareness system.

Composing domain-specific languages for wide-scope software engineering applications

Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) offer many advantages over general languages, but their narrow scope makes them really effective only in very focused domains, for example Product Lines. The recent Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach seeks to provide a technology to compose and combine models coming from different metamodels. Adapted to DSL, it means that it should be possible to compose ”programs” written in different DSLs, which will enable the use of the DSL approach to build applications spanning different domains. The paper presents the Mélusine environment, where such a composition technology has been developed and experimented.

An Approach and Framework for Extensible Process Support System

The issue of building a Process Support System Environment (PSSE), or a family of PSEE, to make them interoperate or to use them to pilot applications or services requires new solutions; there is almost no hope for a single system to address correctly all the issues.

Impact of the research community on the field of software configuration management: summary of an impact project report

Software Configuration Management (SCM) is an important discipline in professional software development and maintenance. The importance of SCM has increased as programs have become larger and more complex and mission/life-critical. This paper discusses the evolution of SCM technology from the early days of software development to present and the impact university and industrial research has had along the way. It also includes a survey of the industrial state-of-the-practice and research directions.The paper published here is not intended to be a definitive assessment. Rather, our intention is to solicit comments and corrections from the community to help refine the work. If you would like to provide further information, please contact the first author. A longer version of this report can be found at http://wwwadele.imag.fr/SCMImpact.pdf.