Change Control Procedures

CHANGE CONTROL PROCEDURES author

CPE 206 project documents are categorized as Single Owner, Public (multiple author), or Restricted. The following procedures apply to each category of document. Add additional procedures as necessary.

SINGLE OWNER

Single owner documents are documents for whom a single individual is designated as the responsible agent. This person is granted authority to make changes to the document at their own discretion. The document owner needs no approval to update the document and it is their responsibility to inform all affected stakeholders of any changes.
The owner of the document maintains the physical document in his/her unix account with public read permissions. A link to the document is placed on the team web page.
Near the top of the document there must be a "mailto:" HTML tag with the author's name (like this document has).
Requests to change the document are sent to the owner who will decide whether the change will be implemented.
All changes will be tracked with a document history table.

PUBLIC (MULTIPLE AUTHOR)

For documents with more than one author, the document will be put under CVS. Document changes are coordinated informally by the authors. All changes will be tracked with a document history table or last update tag as appropriate. The web page is updated automatically by a cron job (read the cron How-To).

SOURCE CODE

Source code is a special case of a Public document that lacks a document history table. Source code is maintained in CVS and developers will follow the CVS Procedure to make changes.

Note this procedure only applies to individual unit code, not to any code that is part of the high level design; method signatures or class headers. For example, you can use this procedure to correct an "off by one" error in a loop within a single method. But if you want to change the method return type, that's a design change, and thus you must use the corresponding change control procedure. It's possible to cheat on this convention but if you do you'll be severly castigated.

RESTRICTED

Documents under restricted access are subject to formal change control. Restricted documents are similar to single owner documents except the owner does not have authority to change the document. All changes to a restricted document are managed by the formal change control procedure.

PROCESS

Process documents define the software development processes to be used on the project. Most of these are developed by the instructor and require the instructor's approval to modify. The change procedure is similar to Restricted documents, except that change requests should be e-mailed to the instructor, not the Change Manager, and the response will be sent via e-mail not posted to a web page.

Document History Table

Is a simple method for tracking changes to a document. It simply lists in reverse-chronological order the date, author, and description of change. An HTML table is acceptable.

Document History
2/17 Gregg Changed links to email to Ian
1/24 Gregg Initial release

Last Update Tag

For documents which don't need a detailed trail of changes, a simple Last Update Tag may suffice. It simply identifies the date the document was last modified.

Last modified on: Jan 12, 2001

You can include a simple javascript that writes the version change date on the document. Here is the javascript code
you need:


<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">

     dateMod=document.lastModified;
     document.write(" Last modified on ");
     document.write(dateMod);

</script>
