Purpose

The purpose of the configuration and change management discipline is to track and maintain the integrity of evolving project assets. During the development lifecycle many valuable artifacts are created. Development of these artifacts is labor- intensive , and they represent a significant investment. As such, they are important assets that must be safeguarded and available for reuse. These artifacts evolve and, especially in iterative development, are updated again and again. Although one person is usually responsible for an artifact, we cannot rely on the individual's memory (or upper-left desk drawer ) to keep track of these project assets. The project team members must be able to identify and locate artifacts, to select the appropriate version of an artifact, to look at its history to understand its current state and the reasons it has changed, and to ascertain who is currently responsible for it.

At the same time, the project team must track the evolution of the product, capture and manage requests for changes no matter where they come from, and then implement the changes in a consistent fashion across sets of artifacts.

Finally, to support the project management discipline, we must provide status information on the key project artifacts and gather measures related to their changes.