Software Repository and Maintenance Structure

Industry experts are increasingly focusing on team productivity as the key to success. The base of the team effort is the four-fold structure of software in terms of logical organisation, physical organisation, managerial organisation, and dynamical structure. In this note, we describe the ideas put into action within the CMS offline reconstruction project for organising software into sub-systems and packages. We use a structure that allows to maximise the independence of software development in individual areas, and at the same time emphasizes the overwhelming importance of the interdependencies between the packages and components in the system. We comment on release procedures, and describe the inter-relationship between release, development, and testing.