I would like to ask members of the community about the role of Configuration Manager, as you see it. I'm not asking what Configuration Management is, as long it had been asked before. What I need to know is:
- What tasks do you think Configuration Manager should perform (or performs) in your team?
- What is primary responsibility of Configuration Manager?
- What are secondary/auxiliary responsibilities of Configuration Manager?
- Does Configuration Manager need to be in charge of development processes on the project/company or he should be told what to do?
- What are relations between Configuration Manager, Build Manager, Release Manager, Deployment Engineer, CI Engineer roles? Aren't they all the same – Configuration Management?
- Maybe term Configuration Management is redundant and Technical/Team Lead should do all the related work instead?
It would be really great if you could share your vision and experience.
Best Answer
Managing the build and release process, working with both the dev team and ops teams in their middle ground.
Constantly removing any manual processes from both build and release, to limit risk during production release.
Improving the relationship and inherent mistrust issues between the dev and ops teams.
Like any role, the better the CM is, the less he needs to be managed. But he should be servicing both the dev and ops teams' needs and resolving conflict from those needs, as opposed to making up problems that don't exist and "solving" them.
I would say that Configuration Management is comprised of all the others. You may have a CM team where different people have different roles. Or you may have one CM who does it all.
No. The team lead should be managing the people and the technical lead should be managing the application. If you trust in CM to be done by either of these roles, it will simply never get done (except in very small companies ... maybe).