6.1 Change Management Concepts
There are many different strategies for controlling software development and maintenance projects. The strategies often depend upon factors such as project size, project complexity, required development/test/production environments, deployment and other issues. For instance, 3 developers maintaining an application on a single system will have different requirements from an international company with 30 developers using 10 systems in 3 different countries.
Typically, the following types of topics are included in a discussion of change management:
- impact analysis for changes
- locking and releasing objects
- source comparison
- identification and grouping of changes
- tracking object history and movements of objects
- synchronization to prevent lost or overwritten changes
- testing changes before migration
- migration of changes between environments (development, testing, production)
- distribution of software changes
A simple change management scenario might be as follows:
- a program enhancement is requested to a completed program in the production environment
- developers determine the impact of enhancement request
- all objects impacted are identified and locked in development environment
- a developer modifies the objects and tests the modifications in development
- any modified objects are moved to the test environment for review and approval
- after approval the modified objects are moved into production environment
- objects are unlocked in development
As more products, types of objects, machines, interfaces and operating systems are introduced, the challenges of change management increase.
There are many 6.1.5 Third Party Packages that can be integrated with the LANSA environment to provide comprehensive change management solutions for the complete LANSA family of products.
LANSA provides an easy to use suite of basic change management features that are designed to be used as part of company's overall change management strategy and procedures.