I.3 CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT IN A BROADER PERSPECTIVE

The World at Large

Universities, research institutes, and companies work with configuration management at several levels. Standards within software development include configuration management as a discipline or a process. During recent years , work in connection with process improvement, including maturity models, has been augmented considerably. Configuration management is included as a process in the best-known maturity models. Furthermore, various institutions and large international projects work with configuration management. These aspects of research into configuration management have been included in the book to provide a larger perspective for what may sometimes seem like an isolated struggle.

A Little Philosophy

Configuration management is the existentialism of software development, because it answers the following questions for individual components or entire products:

• Who am I?

• Why am I here?

• Why am I who I am?

• Where do I belong?

Just as in "real life," a certain amount of leisure is necessary for that kind of consideration, but if you have the leisure and use it in a reasonable way, it's possible to increase your quality of lifeor, in this case, the quality of your products.