Software Configuration Management

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Course Overview

Software configuration management is critical to producing and ensuring the integrity of software products that meet customer requirements, satisfy user needs and provide value to stakeholders.

In this course, you gain the knowledge and skills necessary to establish effective SCM procedures at the project level and transfer the lessons learned to the organisational level.

Audience

This course is valuable to SCM professionals, developers, testers, project managers and team leaders.

Skills Gained

• Construct a project-based SCM plan to control and document project deliverables
• Identify the value of a controlled life cycle to justify the investment in SCM processes and tools
• Initiate software configuration management through a Configuration Identification procedure
• Specify a Configuration Control procedure to track changes to configuration items
• Indicate types and frequency of reports for Configuration Status Accounting to optimise team communications
• Design a Configuration Audit procedure for baselining and product release verification
• Apply SCM at the appropriate level in an organisation

Course Outline

Laying the Foundation for SCM

Analysing the driving factors behind SCM

• Illustrating why software projects do not succeed
• Triggers
• Benefits
• Challenges
• Controlling quality in the software development life cycle

Demystifying core SCM processes

• Configuration Identification
• Configuration Control
• Configuration Status Accounting
• Configuration Audits

Identifying Configuration Items (CIs)

Deriving candidate items for the project

• Identifying CIs in the product and the project
• Differentiating between controlled and uncontrolled items

Categorising and naming items

• Devising an effective naming scheme
• Classifying items based on the nature of the project
• Document CIs
• Code CIs
• Data CIs
• Hardware CIs

Baselining CIs

• Defining baselining procedures
• Tracking "uses" and "used by" relationships
• Checking CIs into the software library

Controlling Change

Determining roles and responsibilities

• Distinguishing between levels of control authority
• The who, what, when and why of change
• Change Authorities, CCBs and ICWGs

Creating a change control process

• Documenting the change request life cycle
• Establishing and communicating change control procedures
• Facilitating change management workflow

Managing problems and emergency fixes

• Responding to critical software failures
• Ensuring the post-fix paper trail is completed
• Providing input for root cause analysis

Communicating Configuration Status

Planning the reporting requirements

• Identifying types and frequency of reports required in each phase of SCM
• Creating a history documenting need, fix and effect

Matching SCM features to SDLC needs

• Version control
• Build and release
• Change management
• Tracking CIs and CRs
• Important SDLC interactions with the SCM library

Auditing Work Products

Designing Configuration Audits

• Timing audits appropriately during the SDLC
• Acquiring audit checklists and verifying audit results

Assessing release readiness

• Confirming forwards and reverse traceability
• Verifying product configuration with functional and physical checklists

Building and Releasing the Product

Ensuring consistency through the build process

• Establishing independence by separating development from the build
• Trunks
• Versions
• Branches
• Variants
• Merges

Specifying the product release process

• Responsibilities of the SCM team
• Matching process steps to release types
• Positioning Quality Gates in the SDLC

Assigning release tasks

• Timing the release appropriately
• Preparing release notes based on change items
• Authorising and releasing the build

Software Configuration Management / 342