ABSTRACT
Configuration control is one of the software disciplines of the 1980s that grew in response to the many failures of the software industry throughout the 1970s. Over the years, the computer has been applied to solve many complex problems; the ability of software to manage these applications in the “traditional” way has all too frequently failed. In the 1970s, software engineering managers learned the hard way that the tasks involved in managing a software project were not linearly dependent on the number of lines of code produced but rather were exponentially dependent. As the 1970s ended, software engineers examined their failures in an effort to understand what went wrong and how it could be corrected. The software development process was dissected, and techniques were defined by which the development process could be effectively managed. Consequently, the most talented and experienced members of the software community began to develop a series of new disciplines intended to help control the software process. One of those disciplines became known as software configuration management.
