Using examples, explain why configuration management is important when a team of people are developing a software product.

What will be an ideal response?

The aims of configuration management is to ensure that (a) changes made by
different system developers do not interfere with each other and (b) it is always
possible to create a specific version of a system. Without configuration
management it is easy to lose track of the changes that each developer makes to
code and for changes made by one programmer to overwrite changes made by
another programmer. For example, one programmer may change a component to
improve its performance whilst another may correct a bug in the functionality of
the component. Without CM, whoever writes the component last to the shared
component store will overwrite and so lose the previous component changes.
Furthermore, systems are usually composed of multiple components, each
of which exists in multiple versions, where each version as a specific purpose. For
example, there may be a versions of a system for different platforms such as
Windows, Linux and MacOS. These versions have some specific components and
some shared components and it is potentially error prone if these versions are
assembled without CM tool support. It is very easy to include the wrong
component in a version and this is likely to lead to subsequent software failure.