Configuration Management: 4 Key Concepts

Four Principles that Contribute to Reliable, Repeatable Processes

Configuration Management ('CM' hereafter) means a lot of different things to different people. Weighty tomes have been written describing the goals, policies, procedures, benefits, pitfalls, and a variety of definitions of CM. One recent CM plan I worked on is a 20-something page document attempting to detail this information and how it relates to the client's projects.

Most of the information available can be boiled down into 4 key concepts, or what can be called the 4 cornerstones of great CM. These concepts represent ideals. The challenge is in the implementation, so that the policies, procedures, and utilities developed support these ideals, or at least the intent behind them.

Version control - Everything is maintained in a Version Control tool like those offered by Serena (commercial software) or Subversion (Open Source). Some agreed set of items (Configuration Items, or CIs for short) stored within the tool represent baselines. In other words, they are the set of revisions currently in production. They are not necessarily the most recent revisions. Builds intended for deployment to any post-development environment (QA, Test, Prod, whatever) are always pulled from Version Control, and never copied directly from a development environment.