Software Configuration Management and Its Uses

In software engineering, software configuration management is used to track and control the changes in the software. Revision control and establishment of baselines are the practices used in configuration management. Experts define software configuration management as a “set of activities designed to control change by identifying the work products that are likely to change, establishing relationships among them, defining for managing different versions of these work products, controlling the changes imposed, and auditing and reporting on the changes made.”

Uses of the software configuration management are:

  • It is used for identification of configurations, configuration items and baselines.
  • It is used for configuration status accounting which involves recording and reporting the necessary information on status of the development process.
  • Configuration auditing which ensures configurations contain all their intended parts and are sound with respect to their specifying documents.
  • It is used to control the configuration and it is done by setting up a change control board and its function is to approve or reject all change requests that are sent against any baseline.
  • It is also used to manage the process and tools used for the builds, manages the software and hardware that host the system.
  • It also enhances the team work by coordinating the team and also makes sure that every defect is tracked.
  • It also gives support for the organization’s development process.