Projektlaufzeit: 1998-2000

The ISG develops and sells software components for the assembly of numerical controls (NC). The software developed by ISG is used for the numerical control of various machine tools such as milling machines, lathes, wood-working machines, textile-working machines, and robot systems. The ISG’s customers are located in various countries and are either NC producers or machine tool producers, who design their own NC using software components of ISG. These components are delivered in source code. This openness allows ISG’s customers to extend the system with their own software modules. The resulting great number of software elements is forcing the ISG to introduce a method to optimise the management of all actions concerning these software elements.

By introducing the configuration management (CM) method, described as a sub-model of the V-Model, the ISG can improve it’s software development process in several areas:

• Increase of software elements’ reusability and therefore save in time and money.
• Faster response on support requests from customers.
• Use of CM reports as an information source for the quality assessment.

The improvement of the customer’s satisfaction with ISG’s control system and the ability to do a fast set-up of new configurations while the acquisition phase of new customers will increase the acceptance of the product on the market.

By the term configuration management (CM), the ISG means all methods, tools, and CM aids, which support the development and maintenance of a software product as a succession of controlled revisions and supplementation based on safe process results.

By introducing CM products (e.g. CM plan, CIDs, change forms) ISG is able to access all information concerning all existing software elements at any time. The realisation of these objectives belongs to the overall goal of improving the customer support. Setting up the configuration administration will lead to the main savings in administration effort within the software development process. As a consequence the attention of this experiment will be turned to monitoring this expected improvement. Due to the clear assignment of configuration identification documents (CID) to each software element, the degree of reused software elements can be increased.

The introduction of the so called "change management" will lead to the most extensive changes within the current software development process. By adopting the ISG’s effective data backup strategy to the CM model and by introducing a detailed CM reporting the maintenance of earlier released versions can be guaranteed to customers.

ISG expects a decisive change in the daily work of software development by introducing a CM method. The effort each developer invests within the scope of CM will increase but the time needed for the development and configuration of new customer specific versions will reduce. This will decrease the time to market and the production cost.

Due to the common software system utilisation by different customers as well as by the ISG themselves, the question of liability needs to be clarified very detailed. Therefore a permanent documentation of configuration changes is important in case of machine tool defects or personal injuries.

The special type of licenses the ISG provides its customers, can act as an example to all institutions involved with open software systems. By providing a software system based on the idea of openness, synergetic effects arise due to the collaboration from the software designer to the programmer up to the end user. This can only be effectively achieved with a sophisticated CM method as intended to be introduced by InCoMM.

The objectives intended to be realised by InCoMM are of interest for software practitioners out of all fields of software technology. InCoMM’s results can therefore serve to all software developers confronted with configuration management problems at daily work as basis for their own corrective actions.

Lecture at 6th European Conference on Software Quality in Vienna/Austria

• Configuration Management for Open Modular Control Systems (Link)

Lecture at EuroSPI' 99 Conference in Pori/Finland

• Quality Assurance for NC-Software with the support of Configuration Management (Link)

INCOMM - Final Report (PDF, 93 KB)