I'm dangerously close to launching a pretty heavy web app and I've got almost everything out on my server in QA. I'm still touching up and making changes here and there and although I'm taking nightly snapshots of my server I would still like to have some form of change management in place so I can determine exactly what changed in my environment if something goes horribly wrong (especially while I'm in production). So I'm curious... does anyone have any suggestions for a good change management app (web or otherwise)? What does everyone else do? Should I just suck it up and use a spreadsheet?
+6
A:
My suggestion would be to use source control. You could have a prod branch and then each development effort could spawn its own branch before it's merged back into prod when you push a given release to production. That way your source control has each version that was ever released in prod (source control can help you identify what changed between versions at the very least).
EDIT: The TFS Branching Guidance was pretty useful and the concepts can be applied with other source control systems. I would suggest reading it if you are interested in this method.
Mayo
2009-10-30 02:39:24