Discovery & The Change Control Process
David W. Oliver · INCOSE International Symposium · 1996
Abstract This paper describes the change control process that is essential for engineering projects to cope with requirements changes imposed from outside the program and to cope with the internal discovery of issues that require the engineering work be altered. The engineering life cycle has been described in the literature by a waterfall model, which emphasizes top down development, and a spiral model, which emphasizes prototyping. Engineering developments in the real world follow neither of these models. In the real applications world the engineering work follows a nominal forward process which can be described rigorously with models, (Oliver 1994a). One step of that rigorous process considers multiple product releases, risk remediation, and partial builds for early validation testing. Prototypes are built to a schedule to meet these project needs In real applications the forward process is never followed without interruption. Customers discover that requirements must change, engineers discover technical problems, and management discovers need for funding and schedule changes. These changes can cause the engineering work to be interrupted at any step of the forward process and to be resumed at any other step of the forward process. Since the work is interrupted at any step and may resume at any other step, these impacts cannot be described in a work flow diagram because it would show recursion from every point back to every other point. The real engineering work conditions can be rigorously described with a forward process combined with a change process, (Oliver 1994b). The change process provides for identification of the need for change, change impact assessment, change authorization, change planning, change execution, and process improvement based on analysis of change causes.