This book is about configuration management II (CMII) and quality assurance. CMII serves to define what the configuration is to be and the associated build and support processes. Quality as-surance serves to verify that as-built configurations conform to their requirements. The CMII model ensures consistent conformance.
What is configuration management?
The term evolved in the Department of Defense in the 1960s. Back then, the DOD paid contractors to develop new weapon systems and also took custody of the evolving design documentation. A copy was then forwarded to whoever won the production contract.
Each contractor was required to have a Configuration Manager. The -480 series of military standards described how configuration management was to be performed. This practice prevailed until the military standards for CM were cancelled in 1994.
The plan was to replace the military standards for CM with a commercial standard in the same manner that the military standard for quality assurance, MIL-Q-9858A, was replaced with the International Quality Assurance standard, ISO 9001.
The new commercial standard for CM, called ANSI/EIA-649, was released in 1998. It was written by the same authors. From a CMII point-of-view, it still contains the same deficiencies.
