The activity of managing change is known as Change Management.  Managing change is typically very challenging and may occur at many levels within a workplace.  A key when implementing a change management process is truly understanding what should be managed and by whom.  For the sake of argument, I will refer to the group that manages the change as the Change Control Board (CCB).  However, there are other names used to represent this group (e.g., Configuration Control Board, Governance Board, etc.).  It is important to understand that while I use the phrase "manage or control the change", a CCB may not really control the change as much as acknowledge the change and apply impact analysis for the change in order to determine the best deployment guidance for the change.

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.

Configuration management for a software product line is a multi-dimensional problem. In addition to the conventional configuration management problem of managing software variation over time, software product lines introduce the additional problem of managing variation among the different products within the application domain space of the product line. Thus we have a configuration management problem in both time and space.