Configuration Management

As I have mentioned previously, Development and Maintenance are two separate things. Development is more risky and, consequently, more costly. Maintenance is less risky and should cost less. But when you make this adjustment you must consider the additional complexity involved with the system.

In my situation I have a system that was initially developed, is going into maintenance mode, but we are also working to expand the functionality into other programs. This means that I have both maintenance and development currently underway. Since I sent the maintenance work to a separate team this means I have two different sets of developers working on the code.

This introduces some risk into the process and requires some additional planning to efficiently and effectively manage the code for both of these teams. In my situation, I'm doing what I had planned, I have 4 releases programmed over the course of the year to maintain the application. But then I have the Development team working to extend the functionality to other programs and they are using an Iterative Development life cycle. Iteration 1 comes out in a couple months. That means that both the development team and the maintenance teams are working on the code at the same time.

I probably glossed over this issue in my previous posts. It is CRITICAL that you implement a really strong CM process to make sure that both teams are able to be productive and leverage work from the other team.