Essentials of Software Engineering, 5th Edition

12.3 Change Control

In addition to the need for configuration management, a large customer support/service organization must have a well-established change control. Just as development organizations must have good change control or risk scope creep and blown schedules, the customer support and service organization must control all the changes, whether the change originated from a customer problem or a planned small, incremental, feature enhancement. The scheduling of changes based on the number of anticipated problems and change requests is usually resource gated. There may be special situations when an unexpectedly large volume of change requests can drive a customer support/service organization to increase their staffing with temporary help ...