Software for change management control?
June 27, 2006 11:23 AM   Subscribe

ChangeControl/ManagementFilter: Anyone know of a good software package to handle change control/management? Preferably free.

Im constrantly updating QA webservers and then moving those updates to production. Im looking for something to help with the management of the updates. When they came in, deployed to qa, moved to production, etc...
posted by flipmiester99 to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
When you say "management" of the updates, do you mean being able to go back and look at what happened when, generate reports, etc, or do you mean actually deploying the updates? Are you already using a version control system with something important missing, or would this be your first?
posted by expialidocious at 12:52 PM on June 27, 2006


Anyway, the two version control systems I have used are Perforce and Subversion (including the TortoiseSVN client). Perforce is big and expensive (unless you have only one or two users), but it does just about anything you'd ever want to do. Subversion is free and open source. I'd recommend either of them - your best choice depends on your specific needs.
posted by expialidocious at 12:59 PM on June 27, 2006


DARCS is free and is also easy to use. DARCS also has extra coolness from being written in Haskell, the "lazy functional programming language."

Perforce is also nice, and free for some uses (but perhaps not yours.)

Here's a comparison of various version control systems.
posted by anadem at 1:26 PM on June 27, 2006


You also may not want to go the version control route -- A version control system is not a change control system, and substituting one for the other is generally a bad idea. Non-optimal, I guess is more accurate.

For (free) change management, I've used Request Tracker at a number of companies I've worked for, with great success. The drawback is if you're going to try to use it in a regulatory change control environmnet, as it generally doesn't include enough protections to truly and accurately audit approval chains, prerequisite tasks, etc. It doesn't sound like that's an issue for you, though.

If you're looking to just keep track of content changes, then I'd say Subversion is the way to go. Free, robust, popular and scalable. If you're looking to track the implementation of those changes -- Who asked for them, who worked on them, how much time was spent, when was it done, etc. -- Then I'd recommend RT.
posted by wolftrouble at 7:57 PM on June 27, 2006


Response by poster: Thanks for all the information...It has helped.
posted by flipmiester99 at 4:07 AM on June 28, 2006


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