Change Management
A critical component of project monitoring and control is change management. As business requirements and operating environments change all the time, the project manager has to manage change throughout the software development cycle from acquisition,
supply, development, operation, and then maintenance. The guiding principles, techniques, and tools for change management are discussed in this chapter.
Designing for Maintenance
Applications are usually in production for an average of eight years. Many applications are much older, having been patched and modified regularly for 10 or even 20 years. Applications that are flexible enough to withstand years of modification are designed with change in mind. That is, regardless of the methodology, independent modules with local effects are developed.
Programs with 10,000 lines of, for instance, COBOL procedure code, rarely are modified easily. Usually, they are such spaghetti, that if they ever work, it is due to good luck. Frequently, change is precarious and likely to cause problems in untouched parts of the program.
In this section, we discuss the techniques used in designing for maintenance. The first, reusable libraries, have been used widely in the aerospace industry. Because cost savings can now be demonstrated from reusable libraries, they are moving into other industry segments. Reusable modules are complete programs that perform some complete function. The next section relates methodology to maintenance effort and discusses how each methodology attempts to provide for maintenance. Finally, CASE tools are related to maintenance and change.