Visual support for version management
M. Wein, Wm Cowan, W. Morven Gentleman · 1992
Development of large systems requires a disciplined approach to dealing with configuration management. The cognitive load placed on the programmer is potentially large and the burden can be eased considerably if the programmer is presented with a clear view of the file system containing source files of the system under development, and the view is augmented with suitable tools. The paper presents the argument that tools and the techniques which exploit the visual metaphor and provide good reference models will increase the effectiveness and productivity of the programmer. This paper discusses the perceptual issues involved and presents the benefits of the visual approach in the context of a novel configuration control system. Introduction Software engineering of large systems is a hard problem: an important factor in its difficulty is the largeness of the enterprise. Software systems have a very large number of parts and the software engineer must move frequently between different vi...