Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mcnc!thorin!unc!cheung
From: cheung@unc.cs.unc.edu (Clement Cheung)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Source Code Control
Message-ID: <8663@thorin.cs.unc.edu>
Date: 27 Jun 89 23:35:10 GMT
References: <133@tirnan.UUCP> <39400029@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@thorin.cs.unc.edu
Reply-To: cheung@unc.cs.unc.edu (Clement Cheung)
Organization: University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Lines: 41

In article <39400029@m.cs.uiuc.edu> render@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>
>I've heard of NSE, but haven't seen any write-ups of it.  (If anyone knows
>of a good one, I'd appreciate the reference.)  From what you've described,
>it sounds a lot like Apollo's DSEE, which has been out for about 5 years
>now.  One advantage SUN has, obviously, is a larger market for their product.
>I'd be interested in hearing of any conceptual/technical improvements NSE
>has over DSEE.
>
>Hal Render
>render@cs.uiuc.edu    uiucdcs!render

There is an article on NSE in the Proceedings of the 11th International
Conference of Software Engineering.

That article only details how NSE can help parallel development without
touching on other aspects of SCM.

By the way, I have been reading over 20 technical papers on SCM systems
in the past few weeks but I didn't find any which deal with management
of object codes. Also lacking is the relationship between SCM and quality
assurance. Almost all systems assume that object codes can be derived
when necessary. But let suppose. 

Suppose your software runs on different Unix platforms. It is a huge system.
Your development team has finished work for platforms 1 and 2 and have passed
the torch to QA. Meanwhile development has begun on platforms 3 and 4.
At this point 2 groups of people will be working on 4 sets of source codes
and 4 sets of executables. Suppose the executables for each platform
is 20 Mb. So we are talking about 80+ Mb of objects code floating around.
This is a strain on disk space plus QA will be demanding bug fixes for
the software for platform 1 and 2.  
	 
 I see that it is necessary to come up with a scheme to manage the object 
codes that are flowing around. (The 2 sets of object code for QA are there
to stay because QA people will be playing with them constantly.)

I would appreciate any reference for managing object code.

Clement Cheung.