An Experimental, Pluggable Infrastructure for Modular Configuration Management Policy Composition

• Authors: Ronald van der Lingen;Andre van der Hoek
• Venue: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering
• Year: 2004

Building a configuration management (CM) system isa difficult endeavor that regularly requires tens of thousandsof lines of code to be written. To reduce this effort,several experimental infrastructures have been developedthat provide reusable repositories upon which to build aCM system. In this paper, we push the idea of reusabilityeven further. Whereas existing infrastructures only reusea generic CM model (i.e., the data structures used to capturethe evolution of artifacts), we have developed a novelexperimental infrastructure, called MCCM, that additionallyallows reuse of CM policies (i.e., the rules bywhich a user evolves artifacts stored in a CM system).The key contribution underlying MCCM is that a CMpolicy is not a monolithic entity; instead, it can be composedfrom small modules that each address a uniquedimension of concern. Using the pluggable architectureand base set of modules of MCCM, then, the core of adesired new CM system can be rapidly composed bychoosing appropriate existing modules and implementingany remaining modules only as needed. We demonstrateour approach by showing how the use of MCCM significantlyreduces the effort involved in creating several representativeCM systems.