A case study in repository selection for a distributed software engineering environment

The German Ministers of Finance have set up a large-scale project for the development of a nationwide uniform tax management system. One phase of the initiation of this large software development effort was the construction of a distributed software engineering environment. The Fraunhofer ISST (Institut fu/spl uml/r Software- und Systemtechnik) and Partner Consult were involved in the selection process of the repository, and the change and configuration management tool for this environment. In this paper, we describe the selection process for the repository. We present a structured approach which tries to minimize the selection costs, and we discuss some of the lessons we learned about the process itself and the state of the market in repository technology.