Multi-level configuration management with fine-grained logical units

The ability to manage the evolution of logical structures in software artifacts is crucial to the success in developing software systems. However, many existing version control systems often manage artifacts as files and have little or no knowledge of their logical structures. Therefore, the development and maintenance process of a system becomes less efficient. We have developed an object-oriented configuration management (SCM) infrastructure that can be used to build SCM services in any development environment. This paper describes the application of that infrastructure to construct a multi-level SCM system for source code and structured documents. The key contribution is the structure-oriented product versioning model that enables flexible management of the evolution of fine-grained logical units at any structural level in a software artifact.