Book Image

Visual SourceSafe 2005 Software Configuration Management in Practice

Book Image

Visual SourceSafe 2005 Software Configuration Management in Practice

Overview of this book

Why is Software Configuration Management important?Software Configuration Management (SCM) is the discipline of managing the building and modification of software through techniques including source-code control, revision control, object-build tracking, and release construction. SCM involves identifying the configuration of the software at given points in time, systematically controlling changes to the configuration, and maintaining the integrity and traceability of the configuration throughout the software development lifecycle.Software Configuration Management is one of the first skills a serious developer should master, after becoming proficient with his or her development tools of choice. Unfortunately, this does not always happen because the subject of SCM is not commonly taught in either academic or company training.When developing software, you need to have a manageable team development effort, track and maintain the history of your projects, sustain parallel development on multiple product versions, fix bugs, and release service packs while further developing the application. This is where the concepts of Software Configuration Management come into play; SCM is about getting the job done safer, faster, and better.Visual SourceSafe has a long history behind it. The previous versions were either loved for their ease of use and integration with other Microsoft products, or hated because the headaches caused by using them improperly. This book will help you to avoid such problems.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Visual SourceSafe 2005 Software Configuration Management in Practice
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Milestones


A milestone (or checkpoint) is a point in time representing a key or important event in the life of a product like:

  • Product changes: If we need to make some important product changes, we mark its state before beginning to make the changes, to have a snapshot of the latest configuration structure.

  • Product builds: Just as with product changes, we want to keep track and identify project builds. This feature can be used by automatic building tools after getting the latest file versions from the database to mark the versions used in the build.

  • Product releases: Releasing a project is a big event. We want to make really sure we know which file versions were used to build a certain project version in order to address potential problems.

Using Labels to Manage Milestones

Visual SourceSafe 2005 manages milestones using labels. Labels provide a way to associate a friendly name with a specific version of the entire solution, a project, or a single file. When reaching a milestone, the current...