Terminology
The history and terminology of SCM (which often varies) has given rise to controversy. Roger Pressman, in his book Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach, states that SCM "is a set of activities designed to control change by identifying the work products that are likely to change, establishing relationships among them, defining mechanisms for managing different versions of these work products, controlling the changes imposed, and auditing and reporting on the changes made." Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach, 7th International edition by Roger S. Pressman (2009)McGraw-Hill, New York
Source configuration management is a related practice often used to indicate that a variety of artifacts may be managed and versioned, including software code, hardware, documents, design models, and even the directory structure itself.
Atria (later Rational Software, now a part of IBM), used "SCM" to mean "software configuration management". Gartner and Forrester Research use the term software change and configuration management.
Read more about this topic: Software Configuration Management