AbstractSoftware release management is the process through which software is made available to and obtained by its users. Until now, this process has been relatively straightforward. However, the emergence of component‐based software is complicating software release management. Increasingly, software is constructed via the assembly of pre‐existing, independently produced, and independently released components. Both developers and users of such software are affected by these complications. Developers need to accurately document the complex and changing dependencies among the components constituting the software. Users must be involved in locating, retrieving, and assembling components in order to appropriately bring the software into their particular environment. In this paper, we introduce the problem of release management for component‐based software and discuss SRM, a prototype software release management tool we have developed that supports both developers and users in the software release management process. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.