Customer Reviews

Software Configuration Management: Coordination for Team Productivity

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This is a small, easy to read book that covers the basics of SCM better than most of the books on the market. Even though it's currently out of print, this is probably one of my all time-favorites books on SCM, especially when I'm trying to introduce the concepts to first-time readers. Many of the books seem to talk around the subject and never actually get down to what the fundamental aspects of SCM actually do.

Until I read this book, I'd only recognized the problems of sloppy source code control, but couldn't describe them, couldn't solve them, couldn't prevent them. Can you explain the symptoms of the double maintenance, shared data, or simultaneous update problems? Do you know the difference between configurations, revisions, and variations?

Be aware, this book cannot be used for hands-on how-to-do-it advice as the technology in the book is VERY dated and relies on examples from Ada, FORTRAN, and SCCS. CVS had not even been invented when this book was published. But, I've seen 300 page tomes on the subject that can't match its explanations of basic principles. What is the "double maintenance" problem anyway?

If I was a manager, this book would be required reading for all new hires.
It's the best book I've found to explain WHY you want to use SCM rather
than HOW to do it. I recommend it to anyone I talk to about SCM. The
good software developers take the hint and thank me later; the others
just want a cookbook list and don't want to understand the principles.

This concise, easy-to-read, and at times humorous mini-tome written by Dr. Babich was a part of the supplementary reading list for one of my college software engineering classes. It provides a gentle introduction to the science of software configuration management, including the topics of version control, concurrency, baselines, workspaces, and information hiding via the use of interfaces. The author is also wise enough to include illustrative case studies.

Although it was written in 1986, and makes references to dated (by today's standards) technologies/methodologies, the foundational concepts (which are really what're most important) are presented with exceptional clarity and comprehensiveness considering the book's diminutive size. It can be read cover-to-cover within the timespan of just a few days. I highly recommend it for graduate or undergraduate CS/IT students, or for those just getting started in the field of team-based professional software development. Along with this resource, I also recommend Version Control with Subversion, by Pilato et al.

This book describes the problems of developing software in teams in a simple and straight forward way. The book focus on Software Configuration Management (SCM) from a developer perspective with good "hands on" examples. Compared to other books on the subject SCM, this is a joy to read. I recommend this book to my students when I teach SCM and I recommend it to anyone that needs a good introduction to SCM.