What is configuration management, and why is it important?

Configuration management was born as a systems engineering discipline in the 1950s, when the U.S. began developing tactical and strategic ballistic missiles. The manufacturers found that they had trouble mass producing missiles from the successful prototypes, because they'd failed to record the contents of the successful configuration in an organized manner. We can only imagine what the result of testing the unsuccessful production models might have been—certainly, something to record in the Journal of Irreproducible Results.

IEEE defines configuration management as—take a deep breath—"a discipline that applies technical and administrative direction and surveillance to and identifies and documents the functional and physical characteristics of a configuration item, controls changes to those characteristics, records and reports change processing and implementation status, and verifies compliance with specified requirements."

One of the challenges of high-tech product development is to ensure…

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