Practical Implementation of

Software Quality Assurance

To

Respected Professor. Mr.Azar

From

Adnan Alam Khan

Assignment No 1

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Software configuration management:
It is a technique to control, manage and organize the changes occurs in software either in term of
code, documents or any other entity during any project.
Benefit:
SCM is necessary because it can determine not only changes but also the person how changed it. It
also keeps track of all the version of the software and how to replicate them across several hosts.
Software configuration management tools available:
VSS Visual source safe
CVS- Concurrent version system
SVN- Subversion
VSS: (Visual Source Safe): It is a Microsoft tool for configuration management which main focus is to
provide centralized version control system. Some of the salient features include:
Support local and remote access with high performance
All the repository data is stored in Microsoft SQL Server to ensure the integrity of the
data.
Support 32 bit and 64 bit operating systems
Built in C++ and JAVA, it has a minimal system requirement.
Has good security features as it uses SSl and Blowfish encryption.
CVS: (Concurrent Version System):It is an open source version controlling system which lets group of
people work simultaneously on group of files. Some of the features are:
We can edit the copy of the files freely. If new versions of the files have been put in the
repository in the meantime, doing an update merges the changes in the central copy
into our copy.
It maintains a central repository of the most recent repository. If the file is updated by
some other user, we can update our local copy.
It allows more than one developers to work on the same file at the same time.
Client server CVS enables developers who are scattered across different geographies
or slow networks to function as a single team.
SVN: (Sub Version)
SVN is the most popular open source Configuration Management tool used for version controlling.
Being open source, it is freely available over the net. It provides many quality control and cost effective
benefits to switch to mid projects. Some of the key features include:
Ease of set up and administration
Fast and flexible update commits
Provides high visibility to changes with the ease of reverting the changes of a file
SVN has automatic merging and conflict resolution which makes locking unnecessary.
Full revision history is maintained by for the files that are renamed, copied or moved.
Has good integration capability with almost everything (window explorer, leading
IDEs, Agile and continuous integration tools)
Switching between the branches is easy
Compression:
SVN is newer and more advanced compared to the much older CVS and VSS.
SVN allows atomic commits while CVS and VSS lacking this feature.
SVN allows renaming and moving file while CVS and VSS does not.
SVN allows for propagating changes to parent repositories while CVS & VSS does not.
SVN supports two networking protocols while CVS only supports one.
Result:After analyzing three different software configuration tools, SVN tends to be a much better
environment than CVS or VSS (unless you have some weird requirements) - so if you can successfully
import your history and save the company money, I wouldn't see why the organizations wouldn't go
for it.
Reference:
[1] Top 5 Software Configuration Management Tools [available online] at
<http://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/top-5-software-configuration-management-tools/> [viewed
on] 4th February 2017

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