Practice: Configuration Management
This practice is a specialization of practice Project Process Tailoring that focuses on configuration management. The practice for Project Process Tailoring fully addresses configuration management, but it does so through general tasks for tailoring process and tools with guidelines specific for configuration management. This specialized practice breaks out specific tasks and work products in order to provide more explicit coverage of configuration management concerns.
Purpose

This practice helps project control and synchronize the evolution of the set of work products composing a software system.

Main Description

The configuration management practice helps teams to:

·         Identify and document the functional and physical characteristics of configuration items.

·         Define which persons or teams are authorized to manage configuration items.

·         Establishing procedures for handling changes to configuration items. These procedures define how change can be managed, tracked and controlled. 

·         Documenting and reporting information needed to manage configuration items effectively, including the status of configuration items which are subjected to change.

·         Perform configuration audit to verify integrity of baselines and releases. 

Relationship to other practices

This practice is related to many other useful practices. For example:

  • Formal Change Management - An explicit approach for controlling changes, including defining states for the change request artifact and tasks for transitioning the change request artifact between states
  • Iterative Development - The iterative approach is the single most significant improvement to the way we build software products in decades, and has significantly improved project success because the feedback cycle is built into the software development lifecycle.
  • Risk-Value Lifecycle - The risk-value lifecycle practice supplements the iterative development and release planning practices with the unified process lifecycle. This lifecycle identifies four phases, each of which attempts to balance value provided against risk mitigation appropriate to the phase.
  •  Continuous Integration - In a Continuous Integration practice, team members integrate their work frequently (at least daily).

  • Stage Integration - This practice covers the integration of small subsystems into progressively larger ones until the whole system is integrated.






How to read this practice

The best way to read this practice is to first familiarize yourself with its overall structure: what is in it and how it is organized.

Begin by understanding the key concepts, you can turn your attention to the tasks performed in the practice:

Also, understand what work products are used as inputs to and outputs from these tasks, such as:

Finally, understand the various guidance elements that explain how to set up and manage your monitoring program

Relationships