Projects where developers are geographically distributed and with high personnel turnover are usually considered to be hard to manage. Any organisation that successfully handles such projects merits closer analysis so that lessons can be learned and good practice disseminated. Open Source Software projects represent such a case. One important factor is good configuration management practices. In this paper, the authors examine the configuration management process for some Open Source Software projects and analyse how process, tool support, and people aspects of configuration management contribute to this success. Finally, we discuss best practices and how lessons learned from Open Source Software can be transferred to more traditional ways of developing software. 1.

Any organisation that produces high quality software merits a closer analysis of their methods such that good techniques can be transferred to other organisations. Open Source Software projects is such a case. We make explicit their underlying process for handling change management and analyse to what extent their success can be attributed to good process, tools or people. Furthermore, we discuss to what degree lessons learned from OSS can be transferred to more traditional ways of developing software.

Extreme Programming (XP) is becoming popular as a software development method and there is quite a lot of literature describing its philosophy and practices. However, in all of this literature Software Configuration Management (SCM) is almost never mentioned explicitly, leaving XP practitioners with the impression that SCM is not needed and SCM people with the impression that XP is not sound from an SCM perspective. We carried out a more profound analysis of XP and its practices seen from an SCM perspective. We found that in general XP and its practices do not go against common SCM standards, if we take into consideration that the XP context is different from that of more traditional projects. However, some SCM aspects need to be made explicit and a number of SCM-specific sub-practices need to be added to make XP a complete and sound development method seen from an SCM perspective. We report on how we implemented “our findings ” on several dozen XP projects and our experience from doing this through several iterations. 1.