The Role of Automated Version Control and Software Configuration Management

The primary role of version control and software configuration management software is to enable team collaboration by providing:

• Developers with team productivity tools that extend existing development environments unobtrusively
• Project managers with better and more concise project information
• Everyone with the ability to contribute comments, suggestions, problem reports, and project documents
• A project-oriented repository for the collection, organization and distribution of project materials

Integration

A good version control and configuration management product should provide a set of integrated tools that address the following three functional areas:

Functional Integration

• Project organization and navigation-Easy-to-use visual project trees to quickly organize files and navigate through projects, with version histories to trace the evolution of each document/subsite.
• Version control-This function focuses on tracking and coordinating changes to documents and includes facilities to organize files and manage storage, library check-in/check-out, and file locking to control access to shared documents, file comparison, and differencing utilities to pinpoint discrepancies between different versions of documents and to resolve conflicts, branching, and merging mechanisms to manage parallel development.
• Defect tracking-On-line defect submission, severity rating, and tracking through the defect resolution cycle.
• Threaded conversations-On-line discussion facilities that allow multiple authors to discuss changes and enhancements relevant to each version.
• Build and milestone management-Facilities to identify milestones and group-associated documents/files, with configuration management that stores information relative to each build, for build re-creation.
• Auditing and reporting-Complete audit logs to track processing of changes, and flexible reporting to see what has changed at a glance.

Departmental/Partner Integration

The objective of any good version control product is to provide a collaborative environment for a number of internal departments and external teams. If appropriate, customers and end users may also want to provide feedback or participate in the site development process in a controlled fashion. This level of integration provides benefits to

• Sales and Marketing-Sales and Marketing are major sources of extranet content and provide valuable feedback as the "gateway" groups between the intranet and Internet audiences.
• Development-Has access to the contributions of all departments working on the project, with a low time investment.
• Quality Assurance (QA)-With a good version control system the QA department gains greater visibility into project component changes and their role in future builds.
• Technical Support-Via threaded discussions, technical support gains an interactive forum for discussing components of the extranet.
• Executive Management-Gains a "big-picture" view of the entire development process, with the option of receiving more detailed reports.
• Strategic Partners, Distributors, Customers, and End Users-Can engage in documented discussions with developers about the extranet's components and can report defects and enter change requests without intermediate paperwork.

Geographic Integration

Extranet Support-Using TCP/IP, users can connect over the Internet, LAN, and/or Wide Area Network (WAN), forming virtual teams without regard to physical location.

Web Browser Support-On an extranet, the Web browser is the universal client. Any Software Configuration Management (SCM) package must enable local and remote users to participate in extranet development using only a browser.