Change Management

Summary

To increase productivity in the application life cycle and reduce time spent in the code, test, and maintenance phases are important. To reduce the effort in these phases, applications should use change control, design for maintenance, use reusable libraries, and use code templates. Object methods are best suited to reusable libraries; nonobject methods are best suited to program templates. 

I-CASE is critical in reducing coding and testing through automatic code generation. I-CASE is also required to build intelligence to support reusable designs.

If managing application change, change control procedures and management are critical. Requirements, designs, programs, interfaces, hardware, or purchased software are all subject to change. Change management procedures track requests from initiation through implementation and allow management reporting of cost, types, and impacts of changes. 

Logging and management of historical decisions can be useful in volatile environments in which applications are subject to redevelopment. A historical decision log keeps track of arguments, reasoning, and rationales for decisions as they are made. After an application enters operation, documentation is still subject to change to reflect the current state of the application. A document table of contents summarizes all changes and the parts of the document affected by each change. Similarly, software documentation is kept in derivations to summarize the actual software and steps used to develop a load module or work unit. Configuration management is the use of software code libraries to manage the official, operational code modules of an application. Delta version and variation management are the principle techniques.

TABLE 18-4 Reverse Engineering Tools

Via/Renaissance

TABLE 18-5 Software Configuration Management Tools