Software Change Management

Prompted by the move to distributed client and server environments, software change management has assumed increasing importance. Customers want software that maximizes their return on investment. Development cycles are shrinking, and companies need to maintain a competitive advantage and speed up time to market. In addition, development environments today are more complex than ever. Organizations may have hundreds or even thousands of developers distributed around the world. It has never been more challenging to manage maximum developer productivity while ensuring high-quality and rapid deployment cycles.

Change management includes the following areas:

Version Control

This encompasses the check-in and checkout or revision management of code, models, and so forth.

Build Management

This represents the re-creation of an application for various revisions.

Promotion Management

This is the control of logical and physical movement of code between development, testing, and production.

Release Management

This is the notification and electronic distribution of software.

Problem Tracking

This is the reporting, tracking, and resolution of application problems.

Configuration Management

This encompasses the management of both physical level software components (source code) and logical level components (specification components, design diagrams, and so forth).

Project Management

This includes project planning and scheduling, task assignment, and tracking.

Distributed Code Management

This encompasses managing and synchronizing code from multiple geographic locations.