SCM - Definition and Overview

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This article is about configuration management. For other uses of SCM see SCM (disambiguation).

SCM is an acronym for Software Configuration Management, and relates to configuration management (CM).

SCM concerns itself with answering the question: somebody did something, how can one reproduce it? Most often the issue involves not reproducing "it" identically, but with controlled, incremental changes. Answering the question will thus become a matter of comparing different results and of analysing their differences. Traditional CM typically focussed on controlled creation of relatively simple products. Nowadays, SCMers face the challenge of dealing with relatively minor increments under their own control, in the context of a complex given system.

Note that the terminology, as well as its history, has given rise to controversy, and often varies.

Tool vendors as well as academics may find an interest in introducing variants for differentiation purposes, sometimes trying in this manner to re-acquire pre-established acronyms.

Examples of related concepts impacting on the acronyms include:

• Revision Control
• Version Control
• Source Control
• Source Code
• Change Management
• Configuration Item
• Software Configuration
• Change Set
• Baseline

In particular, the former vendor, Atria (later Rational Software, now a part of IBM), used SCM to stand for Software Configuration Management.