Introduction

The purpose of the Configuration and Change Management workflow is to ensure the consistency and quality of your project artifacts, as well as to maintain and protect the scope of your project efforts. During the Construction phase, you will place project artifacts such as your software architecture document, your project plan, and your requirements model under configuration management (CM) control. CM is essential to ensure the consistency and quality of the numerous artifacts produced by the people working on a project, helping to avoid confusion amongst team members. Furthermore, as your requirements model evolves, you will need to prioritize and allocate requirements changes to the appropriate release, phase, and/or iteration of your project. Without this kind of change control, your project will be subject to what is known as scope creep the addition of requirements that were not originally agreed to be implemented.

Configuration management helps to ensure the consistency and quality of your artifacts. Change control helps to ensure that you build only what you should, when you should.

To understand and be effective at the activities of the Configuration and Change Management workflow, you need to understand the following sections.

7.1 Configuration Management

In section 7.4.1 "Creating a Culture for CM" ( Software Development, January 1996), Tani Haque presents an overview of configuration management and several important best practices. Haque's philosophy is that project teams need to recognize that software development is a task that produces many distinct artifacts that evolve over...