The Source Integrity Professional Edition User Guide - MKS

Understanding Projects
Logical and
Functional
Structures
Understanding
Archives
Understanding Projects
With Source Integrity, you can control the granularity of your
development process. Source Integrity’s projects let you define
complex development objects and the relationships among them.
Individual files represent the development object at its lowest level.
However, modern software development’s size and complexity make
it impractical to manage at this level. Instead, Source Integrity takes
another approach.
Source Integrity’s approach to configuration management lets you
modularize your development effort. It lets you create logically and
functionally related subprojects that come together to build a finished
application. Every unit—or subproject—in the hierarchy is a
development object that can be managed either individually or
relative to the other objects it interacts with.
You can determine the number, size, and complexity of the
objects you work with.
You can define the relationships between development objects.
You can shape the project to address the management
requirements at your site.
There are two key issues to consider when you decide on the best
structure for your projects:
the functional structure, the directory trees where files reside
the logical structure of the Source Integrity project
Ideally, these two structures should be identical. The physical
organization of stored files—the project’s directory tree—should
reflect the logical relationships among files. Except for very small
projects, however, this ideal is almost never achieved. Usually, as a
project grows, new files and modules are added until the internal
relationship among components becomes too varied and complex to
be accurately reflected by the project’s directory tree.
A Source Integrity archive is the “place” where revisions (snapshots of
an object’s state at a particular point in time) are preserved. Any
development object can have an archive where revisions of itself are
stored, and from which they can be retrieved at any time. It is this
ability to save and recreate every development object—at any stage of
its development—that makes Source Integrity so effective as a
configuration management tool.
User Guide 13