Matthew K. Johnson - November 2002

Before getting involved with Software Configuration Management, I was the IT guy for a small office equipment sales and service company. One of my duties was to administer the company’s central data management program. It was written and maintained by a one-man outfit that only had a handful of clients spread across the country. I would find problems with the application and report them back to the vendor, and we would eventually receive sporadic maintenance releases via our ancient 28K modem. He would fix a few problems, and invariably a problem solved in a previous release would somehow reappear. ‘How could that possibly happen?’ I thought, “How could new problems get solved and old ones reappear at the same time? Was he doing this on purpose, afraid he might run out of problems to solve? It didn’t make sense to me.