Critique, and Discussion of Yet Another SCM Manifesto

It is not SCM that aims at building intelligence systems (BTW, not only into an organisation but also into products), it is Software Engineering or in a wide perspective System Engineering. The whole process of Software/System Engineering consists of transformations of intelligence (knowledge) and system parts. Even more, to perform those transformations, knowledge and physical entities (e.g. tools, but also subsystems that are already (partially) built) are needed. The whole process is recursive, and constantly diverging and converging.

[Didn't Frank simply misread what I had written, and more specifically miss the of between building intelligence and systems?]

SCM indeed structures the understanding and makes "it" explicit. But "it" is not the system under development, but the development process and all the bits and pieces that are needed in the process. The process (and with it SCM) can be decided in advance, and so can the (intermediate and final) results of the process. Afterall, it is not SCM that is under development, but the system is under development.

It is indeed impossible to predict accurately which objects will be produced. Some modules will consist of many files, others of only a few. But it is known that anything that the process brings forward is managed by SCM. Similarly, in biology it is impossible to predict how many, and which, offsprings are born but that does not make biology a science where the information can not be decided in advance.

And thus, SCM is about control of the process and the results that the process brings forward (including the meta-information, which my itself is the result of the process). The only "problem" with SCM, compared to CM, is that SCM also aims to control non-physical items (intelligence / knowledge). Unfortunately, we (humans) have not found a good way to store non-physical items into a physical system (other than first putting them in some kind of physcial representation).

-- FrankSchophuizen^? - 01 Jun 2003

For moving this out of YaScmManifesto, -- MarcGirod - 27 Oct 2006