Reply to post: And also don't be simplistic

And also don't be simplistic

"Anyone who has worked in medium or large organisations will know that there are three levels of change control when it comes to code: (a) the organisation doesn’t have any, (b) the organisation has change control but does it sub-optimally, and (c) change is managed well."

And anyone who has worked in more than one knows that there are a lot more than three options and there's not a nicely compartmentalized right one. What the article lumps together as option B includes a lot of different ways to do change control wrong which have no similarity to one another. It's not three buckets. If we're being simple, it's a one-dimensional scale with the best points being somewhere in the middle.

You can have no change control. You can have change control which doesn't require notification of others or thorough attention to the required steps. That's what the article mostly talks about when it's describing incorrect application. But you can also have change control which is too strong, either because nothing can get done because change control is too onerous (and if that happens, don't expect stagnation, expect circumvention), or change control which puts a lot of responsibility on people unrelated to the change requiring a lot of explanation of the change to people who won't understand it and certainly won't identify problems. Or you could have change control which is implemented correctly in the sense that changes have to be reviewed but is incorrect because the focus is on approval by committee and not the method of anticipating or responding to problems.