Principles of Software Configuration Management

Software Configuration Management (SCM), or Software Change Management, as it is sometimes called, consists of four major activities:

Configuration Identification

This is the process of identifying all of the components of a project and ensuring that these components can be found quickly throughout the project life cycle. As was previously mentioned, a typical extranet project is like a software development project and is comprised of much more than source code or HTML. Configuration identification breaks a project into smaller, more manageable subprojects, such as design documents, special graphic files, and so forth.

A good automated SCM package will support the mapping of a project tree, indicating the logical configuration hierarchy, as well as the directory structure, or physical configuration hierarchy. The version control and SCM product must be able to cross all departmental boundaries to include a wide variety of project participants.

Configuration Change Control

This important activity coordinates access to project components among team members so that data don't "fall through the cracks," become lost, or fall prey to unauthorized changes. To provide protection from lost changes, most SCM systems offer a check-in/check-out process that allows write access to a single user for a project file. Current and previous versions of a file are identified and tracked, with the ability for a user to request a copy of a previous version of a file at any time.

Configuration Auditing

Configuration auditing is a process that confirms that a software or extranet project is on track and that the developers are building what is actually required. By developing a series of checklists that specify what components are in a given baseline, you can audit the degree to which your project is complete.

Configuration Status Accounting

The goal of configuration status accounting is to record why, when, and by whom a particular change is made to the source code of a project. In the past, developers would manually keep notebooks and insert comments into the code, but good SCM systems keep automated histories of all changes and generate reports that describe the changes over a period of time.