6.5 Deliveries Under Configuration Management

Individual configuration items may be assembled in deliveries, which may and should be configuration items in their own right. Deliveries are hierarchies of configuration items and may be constructed of other deliveries in a ramified hierarchy. The individual configuration items in a delivery may be of all types in any required mixture.

The need for a delivery may arise when it is expedient to handle the entire assembly of configuration items as one unit. This often happens when some larger part of a system, maybe even the entire system, is to be delivered for use. The use may be the basis for a new activity in development, an external test (such as onsite acceptance), or the start of production for the customer. Therefore, the concept of deliveries is important from a configuration management point of view, even though a delivery should, in principle, be treated like any other configuration item.

Examples

A requirement specification may be treated as a delivery, assembled from individual requirements each of which is under configuration management. This is illustrated in Figure 6-2. From the hardware- related world, a delivery may be assembled as illustrated in Figure 6-3.

Figure 6-2. Requirement Specification Delivery

Figure 6-3. Hardware-Related Delivery

Project Relationships

The relationships between configuration items in deliveries are purely for the purpose of release for use and configuration management. These relationships must not be confused with relationships established through planning or design, for example. The two kinds of relationships may in many instances be identical, and generic lists may be useful for both configuration management and other disciplines.

However, it's worth rememberingespecially for a busy configuration managerthat the definition and communication of planning or design relationships are the responsibility of the project manager or the development manager respectively, not of the configuration manager.