ABSTRACT
Configuration Management (CM) is a common yet usually misunderstood concept. CM allows managers to better identify potential problems, manage changes, track progress and performance of any product during its lifecycle. Practitioners of CM often face constraining resources in their organizations with widespread unawareness of CM and lack the expertise in organizational dynamics to sell or enforce their CM concepts—outside of their own group. CM is very much a product of the ability of Homo sapiens to produce more than one nearly identical copy of something. The essence of CM remains the same despite the methodologies, such as how it is done in one company, market subsegment, and market segment or what department is tasked with doing CM functions. Hardware-centric configuration managers argue with software configuration managers over concepts such as branches and twigs being a software product structure. Performance optimization and CM implementation are viewed differently by each of the functional resources.
