Real World Configuration Management Snafu
By Ed Taekema in CM, Software on July 17th, 2007
Here is a short example of what happens when Configuration Management goes wrong. bunnie’s blog is detailing the manufacturing arrangements in china for Chumby. Along the way the author has gained a new respect for the high level of skills evident in the Chinese manufacturing sector and hopefully a new appreciation for configuration management.
After the components were sourced, manufacturing line setup and Chumby started rolling off the line. One problem though, an initial problem with the microphone’s incorrect installation, now corrected, had still not resulted in a working product! Not to worry, the workers canceled dinner plans and made everyone available in an attempt to find the root of the non functioning microphone problem. At 3 AM the following is discovered:
Embarrassingly, the problem wasn’t their fault in the end. It was the new firmware release that was given to me earlier that day by the team in the US–it had a bug that disabled the microphone due to a hack that was accidentally checked into the build tree.
This at its heart is what CM is all about, namely carefully controlling the changes that are in a release so that this sort of thing doesn’t drag a project down. Version control in this case did its job (correctly versioning all changes to the firmware code). Configuration Management wasn’t on the job though, since it should have controlled which versioned changes made it into the released firmware.
Technorati Tags: VCS, CM, Chumby
