The software development business, once the domain of a few advanced technology companies, is now pervasive. Why? Because software is less costly and easier to modify than hardware. At first glance this is obvious; building a software telephone switch is a lot less costly than the hardware equivalent. Looking more closely, though, software products have far more features and, therefore, are more complex than hardware products. Software is easier to change, but this just adds to the level of complexity, especially on the management side. Software allows us to build products that are more complex.

The $(eval) function was introduced in GNU Make 3.80 but was a little buggy, 3.81 has fixed those bugs in $(eval) is ready for prime time.  $(eval)'s argument is expanded and then parsed as if it were part of a Makefile.   

The Version Control design pattern is seen when you only want to capture iterations (versions) of static items such as documents, simple applications, and project baselines. Other features of simple version control are that you want to capture and control items while guarding against the loss of any item, maintain an audit trail of each item, and allow for roll back of items to an earlier version. The next design pattern is Multiple States, where you need to track unique collection of items that represent the application at a certain point in the lifecycle of the development process

I am the Programme Configuration Manager for the SOA programme for a large UK financial company, which have adopted an SOA approach for creating new services to replace existing
applications.

Part of the problem which I have found when first trying to come up which a Configuration Management strategy, is that normally you can go to the internet and there are lots of articles on a subject in a particular area. However, what I found was that there is very little and what there is, is mostly theoretical even from well established names.