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Print this chapterChange Management
A critical component of project monitoring and control is change management. As business requirements and operating environments change all the time, the project manager has to manage change throughout the software development cycle from acquisition,
supply, development, operation, and then maintenance. The guiding principles, techniques, and tools for change management are discussed in this chapter.
Configuration Management
Introduction
In the mainframe world, one disk storage device can hold 10,000 or more different data files; large projects develop hundreds of program modules every year; and programmers may manage several different versions of code modules at one time. To support multiple users across different platforms might require multiple operational versions and variations of code modules, and they all have to be maintained. Configuration management is the identification, organization, and control of modifications to software built by a programming team. Code library management software provides a means to identify and manage the baseline for program code modules. The baseline is the official version of a code module that is in production use at any time. Two types of code libraries and the application types they support are discussed in this section. Derivations, which identify each module's history, are included in the discussion.
Configuration management addresses problems originally present in large COBOL applications but are equally useful for the more complex environments of object and distributed software. A programmer might keep several copies of a program and personally track which is in production at any one time. The problem with individual programmers maintaining their own copies is that eventually their multiple copies will diverge and knowing which is the most current can be a problem. Trusting individuals to be good librarians is asking for errors.
Assume next that one official version of programs exists. If several people are performing maintenance tasks on the one version of a program, a high probability exists that the changes of one person will interfere with the changes of the other person. Either the changes of one will be cancelled by being overwritten by the other, or one person will have to wait while the other makes the changes. Both situations lead to delays and are error prone.
In the complex world of distributed systems and multiple hardware/software platforms, different versions of the same software might be present. The only differences might be to accommodate platform idiosyncrasies, but such differences imply multiple versions of software that can cause maintenance problems. When a general change is made, somehow it must be verified as being made to all versions for all platforms. Specific changes for each platform must also be accommodated to allow fixing of bugs or changes that only affect one type of hardware.
Configuration management that consists primarily of code library management software plus manual procedures supports both single and multiple versions of programs to control for different platforms, evolving functionality, and debugging of software changes.