Accumulative versioning file system Moraine and its application to metrics environment MAME

Abstract

It is essential to manage versions of software products created during software development. There are various versioning tools actually used in these days, although most of them require the developers to issue management commands for consistent versioning. In this paper, we present a novel versioning file system Moraine, which accumulatively and automatically collects all files created or modified. Those files are versioned and stored as compressed forms. The older versions are easily retrieved from Moraine by the time-stamps or tags if required. Using Moraine system, we have developed a metrics (measurement) environment called MAME (Moraine As a Metrics Environment). MAME can collect various metrics data for on-going or past projects, since its basis, Moraine, is able to retrieve all versions of all products (files). Both Moraine and MAME have been implemented. Using these systems, we have evaluated the performance of Moraine and MAME with various test data and student project data. The result shows that disk space required by this approach is several times larger than ordinary approaches; however, it is acceptable at the current tendency of disk price decrease. By this approach, an ideal metrics environment has been easily established by developing simple data-collection tools for version files.