Change management needs integrated process and configuration management

Abstract

Change management is a core problem of software development. Management of changes means managing the process of change as well as managing all artifacts of an evolving software system. Both challenges have been focused extensively in the field of software process modeling and software configuration management, respectively. In this paper, we motivate that change management needs an integrated approach to process and configuration management. A fundamental prerequisite to provide such a comprehensive support is the integration of the underlying representation formalism of process and version models. To cope with this problem, we propose a conceptual framework to provide a common conceptual basis of process and version modeling concepts and identify the requirements for comprehensive process support for change management. Furthermore, we classify and evaluate different approaches of how to integrate process and version models from a conceptual point of view.