Lorenzo Oldain Thompson

Business Areas:

Software Engineering Process

Configuration and Change Management

There are two important aspects to the configuration and change management discipline. First, this discipline includes software engineering specific refinements to the change management procedures inherited from the project management process. Second, it specifies how software change management and configuration management interact, allowing for changes to be tied back to specific requests.

Discipline Details

The primary charge of the SEP configuration and change management discipline is to extend project management-based change management procedures into activities specific to the software development realm. The primary artifacts of this discipline are software change management procedures, which directly extend those from the EPMM, as well as configuration and change management implementation and management artifacts. These artifacts serve to tie together the change and configuration management disciplines, linking tangible software implementation elements back to the change requests that they resolve.

Activities

Configuration and change management activities are conducted by the configuration manager, system implementers, and project management roles. The primary activities conducted in support of this discipline are:

Planning for software change management
Monitoring the change and configuration management activities for congruence

Artifacts

Three artifacts are produced as part of the configuration and change management discipline. These artifacts are:

Software Change Management Procedures - The software change management procedures artifact, which extends the EPMM-based project management focused change and configuration management artifact.
Configuration and Change Management Implementation - The configuration and change management implementation artifact provides the link between configuration management and change management. This includes responsibilities across these two areas as well as the actual technical mechanism that will be used.
Configuration and Change Management Report - The configuration and change management report resolves the change management requests for an iteration or release with the configuration management changes made to satisfy these requests. In addition to figures and graphs, this artifact also includes resolutions to change management requests and follow-up activities for requests or issues that could not be resolved.

Tools

There is only a single tool group associated with the configuration and change management discipline, change and configuration management tools.

Change and Configuration Management Tools - The tools used to integrate change and configuration management are usually fairly sophisticated in nature and require a degree of experience to implement and integrate correctly. When done properly however, the reward is tight integration between the defect tracking mechanism and the tool used to record the changes to fix said defects; enabling a high degree of visibility across these two critical components of this discipline.

External Dependencies

The software configuration and change management discipline is dependant directly upon the EPMM. The software change management procedures artifact extends the change management procedures used to govern the project as part of the EPMM process.