An approach to automated building of software system configurations

Authors: M. Bieliková and P. Návrat

Reference: International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Vol.9, No.1, 73-95, 1999.

Contents:

1. Introduction
2. Modelling a Software System
3. Specifying a configuration
4. Method for building a configuration
• Forming the subgraph
• Forming the generic configuration
• Making provisions to include exported components
• Forming the bound configuration
5. Experimental evaluation
6. Conclusions

Abstract: In the paper, we concentrate on a method for building a software configuration. We build configurations by defining the system's model first. We have introduced a model of a software system as an AND/OR-type graph with two kinds of nodes: families and variants. Models serve as useful abstractions simplifying the process of configuration building. Being essentially a graph search, it is inevitable to have a method for selecting a proper version. Our approach offers to a software engineer a framework for specifying various heuristics describing which versions are to be preferred. In our method, the search is further reduced by introducing the concepts of generic and bound configurations and dividing the the fundamental steps of our method.

Keywords: Software configuration management, version control, selection controlled by heuristics.

PS version (1 416K file, 24 pages) together with a GZ version (146K file) is available.

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