One benefit of the team development environment is that you can configure components. That is, you can group components together and manipulate them as a group.
A configuration (not to be confused with a configuration map) is a description of a group of components that identifies, for each component, which component edition or version is part of the group. Many components shown in the browsers are, essentially, configurations of components. For example, an edition of an extended class is a configuration of method editions.
Configuration management consists of two mechanisms: defining lineups and releasing versions. Lineups specify different configurations for different operating system platforms. You can define lineups for applications and configuration maps. Releasing is the process by which a component edition or version is added to the containing component. When you release a component, it becomes part of the configuration of the enclosing component. Thus, you can control which edition or version will be loaded when the enclosing configuration is loaded.
The following list shows the different configurations in the system: