Document Production and Document Change Control

Abstract

One of the basic foundations of configuration management is configuration control. By this process, changes to established baselines are classified, evaluated, approved or disapproved, released, implemented and verified. The prime purpose of configuration control is to ensure that the definition or configuration of the program used in critical phases of implementation, testing, acceptance and delivery is known and is compatible with the specification. It also ensures that, when changes are proposed to an agreed baseline, the same degree of consideration and the same acceptance criteria as for the initial baseline are applied. This is to prevent the unwitting application of what appears to be a minor change by local considerations, which turns out to have a major, unforeseen effect on other areas. This basic concern is similar regardless of whether the change is an alteration to a program specification or a patch to a stable program version.