01-03-2013, 11:45 AM
Configuration Management
Configuration.docx (Size: 23.89 KB / Downloads: 23)
Outline
• Review of the basic software process models and software processes.
• Visual Source Safe tutorial.
Background
IEEE defined a software process as: “a set of activities, practices and transformations that people use to develop and maintain software and the associated products, e.g., project plans, design documents, code, test cases and user manual”.
Following the software process will stabilize the development lifecycle and make the software more manageable and predictable. It will also reduce software development risk and help to organize the work products that need to be produced during a software development project. A well-managed process will produce high quality products on time and under budget. So following a mature software process is a key determinant to the success of a software project.
A number of software processes are available. However, no single software process works well for every project. Each process works best in certain environments
Examples of the available software process models include: the Waterfall model (the Linear model), the evolutionary development, the formal systems development, and reuse-based (component-based) development. Other process models support iteration; these include: the Incremental model, the Spiral model, and Extreme Programming.
CASE Tools
Visual Source Safe (VSS) is Microsoft's version of a source control program (configuration management) that enables you to keep track of multiple versions of documents.
Software Configuration Management is a set of activities that have been developed to manage change throughout the life of computer software. These activities are designed to control change by identifying the work products that are likely to change, establishing relationships among them, defining mechanisms for managing different versions of these work products, controlling the changes imposed and auditing the reporting on the changes made.
With VSS you can go back to an earlier bug-free version of the source code to try to track down where the bug was introduced, compare versions of a document and recover a copy of the document that you saved weeks or months ago.
How Does It Work?
In order for Visual Source Safe to manage your documents, you must first check them in to VSS. When you first check a file in to VSS, the program records the contents of this original version. The document then becomes read-only to prevent you from making changes that VSS cannot track. When you want to edit a document that is under source control, you must check the document out of VSS to get a writable copy.
When you are finished editing the document, you save the document and then check it back in to VSS. VSS will then contain two "versions" of the document: the original and the new edit. In reality, VSS does not keep two full copies. It keeps the original document, and a small file describing the differences between the original and the edited version. If you edit the document 100 times over the course of a year, you will have access to all 100 versions in VSS, without having to use all of the disk space that 100 copies of the document would occupy.
Why Is It Useful?
VSS lets you view any version of your document, or check out any version for further editing. It also lets you pick any two versions-- say, draft 6 and draft 31-- and compare them with the Diff utility. This comparison shows the two documents side by side, with the differences highlighted and color-coded. VSS also enables you to attach comments to each revision; these comments may or may not appear in the document itself, depending on how you configure the program. But the comments can be viewed independently of the documents themselves.
Another very useful feature of VSS is labeling. Labeling provides a simple way of knowing which versions of which documents belong together in a group. VSS was designed for environments in which multiple users are editing the same documents. It permits only one user at a time to edit each document, thereby guaranteeing that only one authoritative "latest version" of a document exists at any given time.