Software release management
André van der Hoek, Richard S. Hall, Dennis M. Heimbigner, Alexander L. Wolf · ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · 1997
A poorly understood and underdeveloped part of the software process is software release management, which is the process through which software is made available to and obtained by its users.Complicating software release management is the increasing tendency for software to be constructed as a 'system of systems", assembled from preexisting, independently produced, and independently released systems.Both developers and users of such software are affected by these complications.Developers need to accurately document complex and changing dependencies among the systems constituting the software.Users wilI be heavily involved in the location, retrieval, and assembly process of the systems in order to appropriately configure the software to their particular environment.In this paper we identify the issues encountered in software release management, and present an initial set of requirements for a software release management tool.We then describe a prototype of such a tool that supports both developers and users in the software release management process.