Configuration Management (CM) maintains the integrity of all work products. Requirements being only one of them. CM involves seven different activities:

• Configuration Identification
• Baseline Management
• Change Control
• Version Control
• Library Control
• Status Accounting
• Reviews and Audits

Although, we're going to focus on only Configuration Identification and Baseline Management.

The first activity in CM is to identify what will be placed under CM control. These are called Configuration Items. Individual requirements are configuration items but that is not the only ones. Other requirement related configuration items include the relationship between the individual requirements, the models representing the requirements and the entire requirement set needs to be placed under CM for each release or iteration of the software product.

Baseline management is another activity. This activity takes a picture of each configuration item as it evolves through four to nine states. Each of the requirement configuration items will have a baseline as it enters the new state. For requirements, SBDi recommends the following states:

• Work In Progress
• Ready for Review
• Approved
• Change in Progress
• Rejected
• Validated in other work products
• Implemented
• Deleted
• Postponed

A configuration item changes state through the Change Control activity. This will be discussed in a future SBDi Tip of the Month.

To learn more about configuration management, we recommend reading Software Configuration Management by H. Ronald Berlack. Published by Wiley Series in Software Engineering Practice.

Pat Ferdinandi