Getting
Started
To get started with adopting this practice, identify if your
organization already has a defined configuration management process that your follow and decide on whether to follow
the organization process (as is) or to adapt the process to your project needs.
Make your
team fully understand about configuration management and need for configuration management in the project.
The
Configuration Manager should establish configuration management policies and conduct a gap analysis between current
policies and the newly proposed ones. Policies may include business rules, identification and naming procedures for
configuration items, baselining configuration items. Policies also determine how often a configuration audit is
required and designate where configuration items must be stored as well as what actions must be performed when
there is a change to configuration items. The identified policies should be documented in the configuration management
plan that helps the team to understand and follows the policies.
Develop
configuration plan to make sure the entire team understands about the approach for configuration management and
performs the CM activities according to the established policies. See Develop Configuration
Management (CM) Plan .The plan includes the configuration identification, configuration control,
configuration status accounting, configuration audits and reviews, configuration Management schedules and
resources.
Create an
environment where the configuration items can be stored, developed and also ensure that the access is
restricted to authorized individuals. This includes setting up the hardware environment and establishing the
development environment. It is important that software configuration management tools are configured properly, so that
the established policies and procedures are implemented and followed accordingly.
Also part of
creating configuration environment is to ensure that each team member should have an own workspace which allows them to
individually develop and make changes to configuration items and then later make them visible to the team. This
includes ensuring the project member can access to any required version of configuration item which
they need.
See Set Up Configuration
Management (CM) Environment.
You need
to establish a standard procedure to make changes to configuration items and also ensure they are
orderly integrated with other changes made by the team members. See Change and Deliver
Configuration Items.
It is required to promote the baselines as part of the adoption.See Integrate System.
It is
important to store and recover archive versions of configuration items.
Common Pitfalls
-
Lack of communication - The
policies should be placed at location where it is easily accessible and location should be
effectively communicated to everyone.
-
Manual Implementation - Tools can
be used to avoid problems caused by manual implementation such as human errors, high cost of manual labor
etc. .
-
Lack of understanding of SCM knowledge - Everyone in the team should be have knowledge
about software configuration management and take proper training needed to avoid confusion, inability to
understand complex topics.
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