knowledge-kitchen

Change Management within Software Projects

Maintaining the orderly evolution of a project after launch

1. Overview
2. Five Phases
3. Conclusions

Overview

Concept

Change management is the streamlined approach to handling changes in software.

Changes are typically required for one of a few reasons:

1. New features
2. Bug fixes
3. Maintenance due to changes in dependencies

Five Phases

Concept

Work on any given change request goes through each of several phases

1. Submission
2. Validation
3. Assessment
4. Feasibility
5. Implementation

Phase 1: Submission

Most change management systems allow their stakeholders to submit ‘change requests’ using a form.

• The form is often filled out in response to stakeholder feedback
• All metadata details of the change request are logged - date/time, author, type, status, etc.

Phase 2: Validation

The change request is then determined to be valid or invalid and the result is logged in the change request document.

Common reasons for invalidity of a change request:

• high-level business reasons
• duplicate of previous change request
• results from end-user or stakeholder misunderstanding of product functionality

Phase 3: Assessment

The time, effort and ultimately cost of implementing the change is estimated.

• this is usually handled by the development team.
• includes estimates of work for all components/systems that may be impacted by proposed changes

Phase 4: Feasibility

Is the change worth doing… now?

Questions typically asked to help answer that question:

• what is the impact of not making the change?
• what are the benefits of making the change?
• how many end-users will be affected by the change?
• what is the cost of making the change?
• when is the proper time to implement such a change?

Phase 5: Implementation

If deemed feasible, the developers implement the change the usual way.

The status of the change request is updated as necessary.

Conclusions

Thank you. Bye.