An infrastructure for development of object-oriented, multi-level configuration management services

In an integrated development environment, the ability to manage the evolution of a software system in terms of logical abstractions, compositions, and their interrelations is crucial to successful software development. This paper presents a novel framework and infrastructure, Molhado, upon which to build object-oriented software configuration management (SCM) services in a SCM-centered integrated development environment. Key contributions of this paper include a product versioning model, an extensible, logical, and object-oriented system model, and a reusable product versioning SCM infrastructure, that allow new types of objects to be implemented as extensions of the system model's basic entities. Versions and configurations of objects are managed at different levels of abstraction and granularity. A new SCM-centered editing environment or development environment for a specific development paradigm can be rapidly realized by re-using Molhado's infrastructure and implementing new object types and their associated tools. This paper also demonstrates our approach in creating prototypes of SCM-centered development environments for different paradigms.