DawnBringer3D Tips & Tricks, Personal News, Game Development

Importance Of Change Control

When you are working on a software project you have agreed to deliver certain features to your customer. But what happens if these features change during the project?

Well first of all the changes will most likely change your project budget / deadline. Example changes :

• Adding New Features
• Dropping Features
  • Someone was able to be honest?

Add Features

When adding new feature you’ll have to change both deadline and budget. If you change only the budget the project will delay. If you change only the deadline the project will not be profitable.

Drop Features

What comes to dropping features, that is probably a good thing, but why were those features dropped? Learn why and improve for the next project.

Conclusion

To control these changes you will need a change control process. What I would do is to pick up a few key persons from the project team and create a change control group. For each (major) change they will have a meeting to decide what is to be done for the change. Also they need to be documenting and tracking these changes somehow, e.g. use excel to track changes and document all the meetings so that people can see why the decision was made.

Change control is just one way to have more organized way to react to changes. Why it exists is because any change (problem) from customer side must never be taken lightly as those can kill your project. And that can happen very fast, I’v seen it.