System Configuration Management 9th International Symposium, SCM-9 Toulouse, France, September 5-7, 1999 Proceedings

This workshop series is now over ten years old, which is a pretty long time for a very focussed topic: Configuration Management. The first conference took place in 1988 (Grassau, Germany) and the topics were focussed on version control and rebuilding. Many people consider that SCM is one of the few areas of software engineering that can be considered to be really successful. Products, that more or less fulfill their p- pose, exist, and everybody agrees that they are now mandatory for a successful so- ware project. Indeed, during the second half of the nineties, SCM has entered a maturation phase, in which good commercial products have been incorporating many of the features - signed and discussed at previous conferences of this workshop. With the generali- tion of commercial products, the question now is: What are the objectives of a sci- tific workshop on this topic? Is there any more research to be done in SCM today? This ninth volume in the series reflects pretty well the current state and mood in the CM community. There are an unprecedented number of papers discussing the current state of the art and trying to identify research directions (session 6). On some core topics, like versioning (session 3), and following SCM8 tracks, papers present work on unified models. Versioning models, after years of raging discussions, now seem to have found a consensus.