Pragmatic software configuration management

Often an organization's software configuration management (SCM) mechanisms don't help with the work of building software as much as they could. Either no mechanisms exist for doing common tasks or the processes to use those mechanisms are too complicated and become tasks in themselves. On a daily basis, developers shouldn't notice SCM that much, and what they do notice, they should eagerly embrace because these things help them do their jobs. When developers don't find SCM processes to be helpful, it's often because the processes don't serve the organization's goals well. This tends to be due to two issues: first, basic SCM structures lacking and, second, the structure doesn't fit well into the development environment. This paper provides a brief overview of the essential patterns for a basic, agile SCM environment.