Configuration Management Stories from the Distributed Software Development Trenches

Distributed projects are generally recognized as being more complex and adding a number of new challenges to project management. Configuration management (CM) can be considered the infrastructure of all types of project being they co-located or distributed and lack of CM or badly implemented CM will hurt any type of project. In this paper, we take a closer look at the role of CM in distributed projects - where can standard CM techniques help, how can they be implemented, and what special challenges does distribution pose. We do that by looking at general and CM-specific challenges from literature on global software development and discuss those in the light of our experience as CM practitioners on different distributed industrial projects. Some challenges in distributed development can be solved or alleviated by CM techniques, for other challenges CM has to be implemented differently - and some challenges are challenges to CM too.