An item designated for management by agreement between customer and supplier.
The item can be comprised of hardware, software1, procedure, or any combination of the three, and can be either contiguous or disjoint in both the physical and temporal domains (e.g., make-on-assembly, or a distributed procedure). CI’s are defined and hierarchically decomposed into subordinate CI’s through Configuration Identification.
The notion of CI is actually quite abstract. When first identified it represents a mere notion, to be later described with a collection of technical requirements as the program matures. Later still, it represents one or more specific designs. Where we get into trouble is when we expect that the later concreteness should be present in the early stages of the process, which simply cannot be the case. Many SE’s simply cannot understand this, and I’ve come to recognize it as a major discriminator between the good ones and the unwashed masses.
Footnotes