Software is defined, built and tested in terms of collections of versioned files.
We believe that the software development industry is poised for a major move to task-based software configuration management, which is based on logical, atomic changes. This paper defines our vision for the future of software configuration management, and attempts to show why we believe the future holds significantly smarter, more powerful, and easier to use systems for managing the software of today's and tomorrow's software development teams. We will discuss how task-based SCM helps software developers, release managers, software testers, technical writers, and project managers to do their jobs. The ideas and methodology described here are based on research and the internal use of task-based SCM systems developed over the past two years, both at Continuus Software Corporation and at some of our key customer sites. Most of the capabilities described here are available today and others are forthcoming.