A Study On Software Configuration Management Supporting Parallel Development

It is a fact that software becomes more and more complex, and change requests to developing software can emerge at anytime, while the development cycle becomes shorter, and software quality is put more emphasis. As a result, development team becomes the basic unit to achieve parallel development instead of single developer who develops an entire project in current software development.In parallel development, version management and team supporting are two basic tasks of configuration management. Although each has its own emphasis, the relationship between them cannot be ignored. As traditional approaches to SCM (Software Configuration Management) treat these two in a manner of completely independent, redundancy and inconsistency of SCM information are inevitable.The deficiencies of traditional approaches to SCM supporting parallel development are discussed, improvements from the level of version management are made, and a target-oriented branch management model and a collaboration mechanism based collaboration group are developed. The new branch management model and collaboration mechanism emphasize the ability of parallel development and team supporting from the level of version management. The explanation to the new model and mechanism includes the model itself, the structure of branch, the management of branch and the approach to supporting collaboration.