Software Configuration Management (Marion Kelly)

Configuration Management (CM) is the engineering and administrative disciples (which include configuration identification, control, status accounting, and auditing) that ensure that every part of the projects configuration is identified, reliable, traceable, and repeatable. These four disciplines are in fact very straightforward and logical ways of ensuring that:


 * you know what you have got to produce;
 * once you have got it, you know where it is and what state it is in;
 * only the right people can use or change it and they will understand the impact of that change;
 * useful reports are available;
 * and the agreed procedures are being followed, so that everything hangs together properly

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Think of CM as a spinal cord, linking all parts of the nervous system; providing the single channel through which all information can flow, but protecting it with a hard yet flexible vertebra!

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A configuration item (CI) is any part of the development and/or deliverable system (whether software, hardware, firmware, drawings, inventories and/or documentation) which needs to be independently identified, stored, tested, reviewed, used, changed, delivered and/or maintained. CIs can differ widely in complexity and may contain other CIs in a hierarchy.

Marion Kelly; Configuration Management: The Changing Image; McGraw-Hill U.K., 1996.