Recommended configuration management practices for freelance software developers

Configuration Management (CM) is an important activity throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC). CM becomes essential if any of the artifacts is to be changed during the life cycle. There are many practices which can be adopted in configuration management to stream line the work and bring the quality to the software development process. For this reason most of the software development companies also adopt configuration management practices with larger teams to implement these practices. The problem appears with the freelance software developers, where the numbers of people working in teams are a few. This is an investigative study which is carried out to find if the freelance software developers adopt the configuration management practices. Moreover, the purpose of this study is to find out the configuration management practices freelance software developers suggest are important and should be done by the freelance software developers. The study was done by distributing an open ended questionnaire to the freelance software developers working in a team of 5-30. The results show that although the freelance software developers do not implement all the configuration management practices, but they do suggest a few practices which they feel are important for them to carry out their work efficiently.