Software release management is the process through which software is made available to and obtained by its users. Until now, this process has been relatively straightforward. However, the emergence of component-based software is complicating software release management. Increasingly, software is constructed via the assembly of pre-existing, independently produced, and independently released components. Both developers and users of such software are affected by these complications. Developers need to accurately document the complex and changing dependencies among the components constituting the software. Users must be involved in locating, retrieving, and assembling components in order to appropriately bring the software into their particular environment. In this paper, we introduce the problem of release management for component-based software and discuss SRM, a prototype software release management tool we have developed that supports both developers and users in the software release management process.

The goal of the University of Colorado Arcadia project was to explore the problems of wide-area software engineering. Historically, the project was the second phase in a long-term Arcadia consortium of universities and companies whose goal was to advance the state of the art in software engineering environments. The University of Colorado Arcadia project has been successful in achieving its objective: producing innovative, useful, and interesting research results in the areas of software process, software architecture, configuration management, deployment, data management, distributed computing, and web-data management. These research results were embodied in a number of prototype systems: Q (distributed computing), ProcessWall (software process execution) Balboa (software process capture), Sybil (database integration), NUCM (distributed configuration management), SRM (software release), DVS (distributed development), Software Dock (distributed wide-area deployment), Siena (Internet-scale event notification), Aladdin (software architecture analysis), Menage (configurable software architecture) , and WIT (federating web-data). The results from this project have been widely disseminated in the form of publications, software distributions to over 600 sites, technical transfers to commercial practice, and through the conferring of degrees upon quality Ph. D. and M. S. students.