Why should you take the Configuration Management course?

Who should take this course?

Anyone who will take part in development and production of products. In fact, for parts of the course it really doesn't matter whether you develop roller skates or software - the concepts and principles are identical.
Other parts of the course are not particularly related to handling code, but are useful if you handle any kind of digital information and have to develop it in collaboration with other people.
A rather small part of the course is strictly related to developing software - where code has to be compiled, linked, loaded and packaged to become applications. But then again - the concepts and principles would be applicable to any kind of "production process" that could be automated.

This course often have students from the "Industrial Economy" programme and they usually get good grades even though some of them claim to have "absolutely no IT background".

Why SCM (Software Configuration Management)?

First of all, SCM is great fun because it is a highly interdisciplinary field. It touches many subjects from Software Engineering in general and Programming in particular, but also has aspects from Collaborative Work, Working In Groups, Knowledge Management, Cognitive Science and more.

SCM is probably one of the most important and cross-cutting subjects in software engineering. In part, it provides the infrastructure for a software organization that allows "things" to flow around in an orderly and controlled fashion. So no matter whether you will work with requirements, test, programming, quality assurance or project management you will get into contact with SCM and will be a better employee if you know why you have to follow some apparently stupid processes and why there are things you should never do. In part, SCM provides a collaboration framework for a software team. It helps people co-ordinate their efforts and integrate contributions into coherent wholes. Knowing these techniques will allow you to implement them on your next project and make your (and your team's) life easier - and make you a valuable participant on any (software) team.

Actually, I don't understand why anyone would miss the opportunity to learn some configuration management ;-)

What are you up for?

A course that uses exiting and innovative pedagogical principles and techniques to ensure as much learning as possible with as little effort and time (from you and me) as possible. We will use concepts such as "flipped classroom", "videos" and "student peer assessment".

What is SCM not?

Configuration Management is not about PC hardware, network or application configuration.

SCM is not an acronym for Supply Chain Management - in this course.

And - if you are Linus Torvalds - it is not an acronym for Source Code Management ;-)

Updated July 28, 2021