CSC2012 Professional Software Development 2

Lecture 03

Configuration Management

Peter CY YAU
 Configuration Management

• Configuration management (CM) is a process for establishing and maintaining

consistency of a product's performance, functional, and physical attributes with its
requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life.
• The CM process is widely used by military engineering organizations to manage

changes throughout the system lifecycle of complex systems, such as weapon

systems, military vehicles, and information systems.

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 Software Configuration Management

• Outside the military, the CM process is also used with IT service management as
defined by ITIL, and with other domain models in the civil engineering and other
industrial engineering segments such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, and buildings.
The software configuration management (SCM) process is looked upon by
• practitioners as the best solution to handling changes in software projects.
It identifies the functional and physical attributes of software at various points in
• time, and performs systematic control of changes to the identified attributes for the
purpose of maintaining software integrity and traceability throughout the software
development life cycle.

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 Software Configuration Management Process

• The SCM process further defines the need to trace changes, and the ability to verify
that the final delivered software has all of the planned enhancements that are
supposed to be included in the release. It identifies four procedures that must be
defined for each software project to ensure that a sound SCM process is implemented.
They are:
• Configuration identification
• Configuration control
• Configuration status accounting
• Configuration audits

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 What is a Service?

• A means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to

achieve, but without the ownership of specific costs and risks.
• Is software a service?
• Yes / No?
• How this question change over time?
•Which Project Management framework can we apply?
• PMP / PRINCE2 / ITIL?

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 Configuration Management in ITILv3

• The Process responsible for maintaining information about Configuration Items

required to deliver an IT Service, including their Relationships.
• This information is managed throughout the Lifecycle of the CI.
• Configuration Management is part of an overall Service Asset and Configuration
Management Process.

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 Asset and Configuration Item

• An “Asset” is something that has intrinsic value to a person or an enterprise. A

• “Configuration Item” is an entity or thing that tracking (monitoring) is required by
you for the delivery of a service.

• An Asset is often a Configuration Item but Configuration Items are not necessarily
Assets.

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 Asset and Configuration Item

•Make “Server” as an example

• Asset
•Model, CPU, RAM, OS, etc.
•CI
•Technical: Technical attributes that are similar to Asset attributes.
•Ownership: Responsible Person, Purchase Date, Warranty Info, Location.
•Relationship: Details about how this CI contributes to the delivery of a service
which ultimately brings value to the business.

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 CMDB

•A configuration management database (CMDB) is a file or written form.

•Nowadays, usually in the form of a standardized database
•It contains all relevant information about the hardware and software components
used in an organization's IT (information technology) services and the relationships
between those components.
•A CMDB provides an organized view of configuration data and a means of
examining that data from any desired perspective.

Prepared by Peter YAU Source: https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/configuration-management-database 9

 CMDB in ITIL

•Configuration items (CIs) are the focal point of a CMDB. Without a clear definition of
what qualifies as a CI, you will constantly struggle with deciding whether to put
certain kinds of data into the CMDB.
•Simply put, a CI is an instance of an entity that is part of your environment and has
configurable attributes specific to that instance.
•These entities can be physical (such as a computer system), logical (such as an
installed instance of a software program), or conceptual (such as a business
service).
•But they must be a direct part of your environment, rather than information about
such a part.

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 Examples of CIs and non-CIs

•Configuration items
•A business service is part of your environment and has configurable attributes,
such as criticality to the business and cost of interruption of service.
•A computer system is part of your environment and has configurable attributes,
such as serial number, processor speed, and IP address.
•A building is part of your environment and has configurable attributes, such as
number of rooms, climate control system, and alarm system.
•An employee is part of your environment and has configurable attributes, such
as skills, hours, and department.
•A software instance installed on a computer system is part of your environment
and has configurable attributes, such as license key, patch level, and licenses
available.

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 Examples of CIs and non-CIs (Cont)

•Not configuration items

•An incident ticket has configurable attributes but is not a direct part of your
environment. It is information about other entities (a computer system, for
example) that are part of your environment.
•A software package is not part of your environment, only installed instances of it
are, and is usually stored in the Definitive Media Library (DML).
•An event does not have configurable attributes and is not part of your
environment.

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 CI Eligibility Matrix

•Consider creating a CI eligibility matrix to help you make decisions about which
items in your IT environment should be CIs.
•A CI eligibility matrix lists each CI candidate, its CI type (such as infrastructure or
service), and several eligibility criteria to consider as part of your decision-making
for CI candidates.
•Specific eligibility criteria vary according to the needs of your business

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 CI Eligibility Matrix Criteria

•Cost or value: Does the CI candidate have an associated monetary cost or value to
your business?
•Change considerations: Would the CI candidate be impacted by IT change
requests?
•Traceability: Are you required to track changes made to the CI candidate?
•Governance and compliance requirements: Is the CI candidate crucial to
maintaining compliance with standards and other requirements?
•Management of service commitments: Is the CI candidate required to help you meet
your service commitments to the business?

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 CI Eligibility Matrix Criteria (Cont)

•Maintainability: Are you required to maintain the CI candidate? •Delivery cost and
quality: Is there a monetary cost associated with how the CI is
delivered and maintained?
• Others:
•Do you, and not a third party, manage the CI candidate?
•Is the CI candidate unique?
•Other factors specific to your business needs.

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 Acknowledgements

Teaching materials in this slide is derived, referenced and/or extracted from the following sources. We try
to make the acknowledgements and references as accurate as possible. Thank you very much.
•Internet Resources, such as Wikipedia, RightStar Inc., DigitalOcean, etc.
•IEEE Library, IEEE Xplore
•COMPSCI4015 Professional Software Development (H), University of Glasgow (UoG), Dr. Tim Storer
•COMPSCI3005 - Software Engineering M3, UoG, Dr. Richard McCreadie
•Software Engineering (Publisher: Pearson), Ian Sommerville
•Engineering Software Products: An Introduction to Modern Software Engineering (Publisher:
Pearson), Ian Sommerville.

•Contents, and comments

from Dr Cao Qi
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