Configuration management

Configuration management is a management process for establishing and maintaining the consistency of a product performance, functional and physical attributes with its requirements, design and operational information throughout its life. It originated in the United States Department of Defense in the 1950s as a discipline for managing hardware, became formal in the late 1960s through the DoD 480 series of military standards, and was later consolidated into MIL-STD-973 in 1991, which fed into the widely used ANSI-EIA-649 standard. Its purpose is to verify that systems perform as intended with proper documentation and to manage changes to a system in a controlled way that improves reliability and maintainability while reducing cost and risk. Configuration management is now standard practice across the military, IT service management under frameworks such as ITIL, civil engineering projects like roads, bridges, dams and buildings, and industrial engineering generally. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/