Software configuration management is an important element of software quality assurance. Its primary responsibility is the control of chang...
Software configuration management is an important element of software quality assurance. Its primary responsibility is the control of change. However, SCM is also responsible for the identification of individual SCIs and various versions of the software, the auditing of the software configuration to ensure that it has been properly developed, and the reporting of all changes applied to the configuration.
Any discussion of SCM introduces a set of complex questions:
• How does an organization identify and manage the many existing versions of a program (and its documentation) in a manner that will enable change to be accommodated efficiently?
• How does an organization control changes before and after software is released to a customer?
• Who has responsibility for approving and ranking changes?
• How can we ensure that changes have been made properly?
• What mechanism is used to appraise others of changes that are made?
These questions lead us to the definition of five SCM tasks: identification, version control,
change control, configuration auditing, and reporting.
