An Experimental, Pluggable Infrastructure for Modular Configuration Management Policy Composition

Building a configuration management (CM) system is a difficult endeavor that regularly requires tens of thousands of lines of code to be written. To reduce this effort, several experimental infrastructures have been developed that provide reusable repositories upon which to build a CM system. In this paper, we push the idea of reusability even further. Whereas existing infrastructures only reuse a generic CM model (i.e., the data structures used to capture the evolution of artifacts), we have developed a novel experimental infrastructure, called MCCM, that additionally allows reuse of CM policies (i.e., the rules by which a user evolves artifacts stored in a CM system). The key contribution underlying MCCM is that a CM policy is not a monolithic entity; instead, it can be composed from small modules that each address a unique dimension of concern. Using the pluggable architecture and base set of modules of MCCM, then, the core of a desired new CM system can be rapidly composed by choo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Ronald van der Lingen, André van der Hoek
• Keywords: CM System, Generic Cm Model, ICSE 2004, Representative Cm Systems, Software Engineering