In a distributed architecture, why is it difficult to manage versions?

Question

I see this time and time again. The UAT test manager wants the new build to be ready to test by Friday. The one of the first questions asked, in the pre-testing meeting is, "what version will I be testing, against?" (which is a fair question to ask). The room goes silent, then someone will come back with, "All the assemblies have their own version, just right-click and look at the properties...".

From the testing managers point-of-view, this is no use. They want a version/label/tag across everything that tells them what they are working on. They want this information easily avaialble.

I have seen solutions where the version of diffierent areas of a system being stored in a datastore, then shown on the main application's about box. Problem is, this needs to be maintained.

What solutions have you seen that gets around this on going problem?

EDIT. The distributed system covers VB6, Classic ASP, VB.Net, C#, Web Services (accross departments, so which version are we using ?), SQL Server 2005.

Answer 1

I think the problem is that you and your testing manager are speaking of two different things. Assembly versions are great for assemblies, but your test manager is speaking of a higher-level version, a "system version", if you will. At least that's my read of your post.

What you have to do in such situations is map all of your different component assemblies into a system version. You say something along the lines of "Version 1.5 of the system is composed of Foo.Bar.dll v1.4.6 and Baz.Qux.dll v2.6.7 and (etc.)". Hell, in a distributed system, you may want different versions for each of your services, which may in and of themselves, be composed of different versions of .dlls. You might say, for example: "Version 1.5 of the system is composed of the Foo service v1.3, which is composed of Foo.dll v1.9.3 and Bar.dll v1.6.9, and the Bar service v1.9, which is composed of Baz.dll v1.8.2 and Qux.dll v1.5.2 and (etc.)".

Doing stuff like this is typically the job of the software architect and/or build manager in your organization.

There are a number of tools that you can use to handle this issue that have nothing to do with your language of choice. My personal favorite is currently Jira, which, in addition to bug tracking, has great product versioning and roadmapping support.