The Impact of Global Software Development on Software Configuration Management.

In today’s large and complex software projects, companies have understood the importance of software configuration management. The ability to manage changes effectively is a major key to successful projects. At the same time, the global software development has become common. Virtual corporations, usage of subcontractors, and starting a new development in a country, where the labour costs are cheaper, are few examples of the reason why software corporations are going global. The aim of this study is to analyse what kinds of impacts the emerging trend of global software development has on software configuration management systems. The main conclusion is that the role of software configuration management is greater in global software projects than in local projects. Global software projects have extra requirements on software configuration management that can be divided in three groups: security, reliability, and ease of use. In an ideal situation, the used software configuration management tool supports all these requirements. However, the software company needs also to define processes to the software configuration management system to overcome all of the requirements.1. Introduction 1 2. Software configuration management 3 2.1. Background 5 2.2. Main concepts 6 2.3. Different areas of software configuration management 9 2.3.1. Configuration identification 10 2.3.2. Configuration control 12 2.3.3. Status accounting 14 2.3.4. Auditing 15 2.4. Software configuration management plan 16 2.5. Tools 18 2.6. Software configuration management in a lifecycle of a project 20 2.7. Summary 23 3. Global software development 25 3.1. Background 25 3.2. Main concepts 27 3.3. Global software development categories 27 3.4. Challenges 29 3.4.1. Organisational issues 30 3.4.2. Communication issues 31 3.4.3. Cultural issues 33 3.4.4. Technical issues 34 3.5. Models of distributed software development 34 3.6. Architectures 35 3.7. Combinations of architectures and models 38 3.8. Summary 40 4. SCM in global software development 42 4.1. Organisational issues and SCM 42 4.2. Communication issues and SCM 44 4.3. Cultural issues and SCM 45 4.4. Technical issues and SCM 45 4.5. SCM tools and global software development 46 4.6. The impact of different models and architectures on SCM 48 4.7. The object-oriented team model 50 4.8. Implications 52 5. Case study: RC2 project in Nokia Networks 56 5.1. Basic concepts of ClearCase 56 5.2. Basic concepts of the SCM system 57 5.3. Used models and architectures 58 5.4. Impacts on the SCM system 59 5.4.1. Impacts of the security requirements 60 5.4.2. Impacts of the reliability requirements 60 5.4.3. Impacts of the ease of use requirements 62 6. Conclusions 6