change management

There is a good amount of training, discussion and many articles concerning software configuration management (SCM) standards that tell us to implement configuration identification, status accounting, routine auditing, etc. All of this information is good and very important because it helps us understand the overall objectives. Rarely, though, do you find real tangible approaches for "how" to actually implement solutions that accomplish the objectives. This article will discuss a typical SCM Implementation engagement focusing on some practical best practices in order to achieve the objectives of the many CM standards out there. These best practices won't apply to all situations.

Change control is a configuration management process used to manage changes to important baselines like requirements and production. Change control may be considered a critical practice in that it often can be used to manage critical items within a project lifecycle, an application lifecycle, or the organization. It can be challenging to implement change control effectively. Often the reason why is because there is an anti-pattern (poor unworkable solution) in place.

“But it was just a tiny little change! How could we have known it would cause such big problems?” Regression (going backward) is a fact of life in software systems. Even though something worked before, there is no guarantee that it will work after the latest "minor" change. Yes, modular design and sound system architecture can limit the likelihood of unintended effects, but they won't eliminate them all together.

Increasingly application deployment is a focus of the total CM picture. Why should it be? Isn't it something separate? Integration of application deployment with configuration management can both simplify the process and, in the optimal case, permit multiple simultaneous deployments without any additional effort. A goal here might be to allow different users to see a different versions of the application. Or it might be just to automate deployment. In this article, we'll look at the two main trends in deployment : the single point network application deployment and the more traditional deployment for either installation packaging or in-house use.