SCM Papers

The SEI CM documents archive

See http://www.sei.cmu.edu/legacy/scm/scmDocSummary.html. All these papers are excellent. Of particular note are the following papers:

The Spectrum of Functionality in CM Systems, by Susan Dart
Concepts in CM, by Susan Dart
The Past, Present and Future of CM, by Susan Dart
Configuration Management Models in Commercial Environments, by Peter Feiler
Transaction-Oriented CM: a Case Study, by Peter Feiler and Grace Downey

Susan Dart's Publications

In fact, just about anything by Susan Dart is good reading for developing a good understanding of what SCM is and should be. See a list of her publications (with many online references) at http://www.susandart.com/print/publctns.html.

SCM with Version Sets

The full title is Configuration Management with Version Sets: A Unified Software Versioning Model and its Applications. It Andreas Zeller's Ph.D. thesis (at http://www.infosun.fmi.uni-passau.de/st/papers/zeller-phd/. Also see http://www.infosun.fmi.uni-passau.de/st/papers/ for a list of other papers) and it is chock full of info describing both the state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice of SCM concepts, tools, and techniques.

Research links

: this section started by HeiniAarela^? - 27 Dec 2002

There is an exstensive listing of SCM papers from Springer-Verlag publications but alas it seems to catalog the papers without actually providing links to their content
If someone has URL's to those often-referred-to papers by David B. LeBlang^?, please add them somewhere on this page.
Andre van der Hoek's Publications on SCM and Architecture_ has a great many papers on all aspects of SCM including architecture, deployment, versioning, system modelling, release engineering, and just about all other aspects of SCM
Impact of the Research Community on the Field of Software Configuration Management gives some pointers to research, both academic and industrial. You find it from ACM Digital Library as well.
For examples of current academic research, see Adele Team's papers, such as: Schema Evolution in Software Engineering Databases.
Or see A Layered Architecture for Uniform Version Management (as an IEEE paper, it is subject to charge, but you can get it directly from the authors, e.g. Bernhard Westfechtel).
- In my opinion, the authors make a mistake by over-emphasizing some approaches (e.g. ClearCase) and overlooking some other (e.g. former Continuus, now CM Synergy). The paper was written too early to mention ClearCaseUCM^? and its composite baselines, but the more flexible grouping project concept of Continuus has has been there for years.
The IEEE article is based on an earlier paper which in my opinion is more relevant: Version models for software configuration management in ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 30, No. 2, June 1998 (you can find it from ACM Digital Library, but search engines easily find it also on several university sites).
Finally, a more earthly viewpoint (potential material for research ): Linus Gives Bitkeeper A Test Run and Buried alive in patches.

Note that

Some of my links may be covered by Proceedings of the International SCM Workshops, but the titles listed there do not tell much about the contents. - I don't mean to criticize, I just decided to augment the list. Those who have found interesting articles under the book titles, please add your comments, under the appropriare title.
I wanted to include only direct web links, no book references.
I wanted to add some most recent topics apparently missing from Brad's list. Also teh abovementioned Hal Render's list has not been updated recently.
I wanted to narrow down my own contribution to what I personally felt relevant. I had collected these links while I was looking for a specific topic to appear in research papers, but to my great disappointment I did not find it, at least not from the material available to Google.

-- HeiniAarela^? - 07 Jan 2003