Configuration Management in Time and Space

Software configuration management (CM) tools and techniques tend to focus on managing individual products. However, most development organizations today must create and maintain a product line - a collection of closely related products with variations in features and functions - rather than just a single product.

What is the effect of product line versus product on configuration management? Recently the industry has discovered that the answer to this question has significant strategic implications on the way that companies operate and compete. Companies such as Nokia, HP, Philips, Boeing, Cummins and many more have achieved one to two order-of-magnitude improvements in time-to-market, engineering cost, defect rates, and development capacity simply by adopting what are called Software Product Line techniques for managing the variations in their product lines.

Divide and Conquer

Configuration management for a software product line is a multi-dimensional problem. In addition to the conventional problem of managing software evolution over time, software product lines introduce the additional problem of managing variation among the different products within the application domain space of the product line. Thus we have a CM problem in both time and space. The potentially complex interactions between CM in time and in space can make the development of a CM solution for software product lines a formidable challenge.

This challenge can be "divided" into smaller problems, and then "conquered" by addressing each of these more manageable sub-problems. A best practice utilized extensively by BigLever Software clients partitions the problem along two dimensions, (1) the granularity of software assets (files, components, and products), and (2) the time/space distinction (sequential time, parallel time, domain space). The resulting 3x3 grid exposes 9 smaller problems that can be solved using conventional CM technology, component baselining techniques, and the BigLever Software Gears software product line variation management capabilities.

For detailed information, see the BigLever Software paper Variation Management for Software Product Lines, available from our Publications page, or contact us for a technical discussion.