Introduction to Configuration & Change Management
Introduction 
To paraphrase the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model (SEI CMM) 'Configuration and Change Request Management control change to, and maintain the integrity of, a project’s artifacts'. Configuration and Change Request Management (CM and CRM) involves identifying configuration items, restricting changes to those items, auditing changes made to those items, and defining and managing configurations of those items throughout the software development process. The methods, processes, and tools used to provide change and configuration management for an organization can be considered as the organization’s CM System.
An organization's Configuration and Change Request Management System (CM System) holds key information about its product development, deployment and maintenance processes, and retains the asset base of potentially re-usable artifacts resulting from the execution of these processes. The CM System is an essential part of the overall processes.
Purpose
A CM System is essential for controlling the numerous artifacts produced by the many people who work on a common project. Control helps avoid costly confusion, and ensures that resultant artifacts are not in conflict due to some of the following kinds of problems:
- Simultaneous Update
When two or more workers work separately on the same artifact, the last one to make changes destroys the work of the former. The basic problem is that if a system does not support simultaneous update this leads to serial changes and slows down the development process. However, with simultaneous update, the challenge is to detect that updates have occurred simultaneously and to resolve any integration issues when these changes are incorporated
- Limited Notification
When a problem is fixed in artifacts shared by several developers, and some of them are not notified of the change.
- Multiple Versions
Most large programs are developed in evolutionary releases. One release could be in customer use, while another is in test, and the third is still in development. If problems are found in any one of the versions, fixes need to be propagated between them. Confusion can arise leading to costly fixes and re-work unless changes are carefully controlled and monitored.
A CM System is useful for managing multiple variants of evolving software systems, tracking which versions are used in given software builds, performing builds of individual programs or entire releases according to user-defined version specifications, and enforcing site-specific development policies.
Some of the direct benefits provided by a CM System are that it:
- supports development methods,
- maintains product integrity,
- ensures completeness and correctness of the configured product,
- provides a stable environment within which to develop the product,
- restricts changes to artifacts based on project policies, and
- provides an audit trail on why, when and by whom any artifact was changed.
In addition, a CM System stores detailed ‘accounting’ data on the development process itself: who created a particular version (and when, and why), what versions of sources went into a particular build, and other relevant information.
Relation to Other Workflows
An organization’s CM System is used throughout the product’s lifecycle, from inception to deployment. As an organization’s asset repository, the CM system contains current and historical versions of source files of requirements, design and implementation artifacts that define a particular version of a system or a system component
The Implementation Model, represented in the CM System, contains all the artifacts required to implement the product. As such, the Configuration & Change Management (CCM) workflow is related to all the other process workflows:
- The Business Modeling workflow,
- The Requirements workflow,
- The Analysis & Design workflow,
- The Implementation workflow,
- The Test workflow,
- The Deployment workflow, and
- The Project Management workflow.
as it serves as a repository for their resultant artifacts.
