What is Configuration Management (CM) and why is baselining important?

• A. CM controls baselines and changes to work products, ensuring integrity and traceability across the lifecycle.
• B. CM manages baselines and changes to work products, ensuring configuration integrity.
• C. CM is focused on measuring product quality and performance data.
• D. CM governs supplier contracts and service-level agreements.

Answer: (B)

Configuration Management is about keeping a product’s configuration accurate and controllable over time by identifying configuration items, controlling changes to them, and maintaining baselines. Baselining creates a formally approved snapshot of the configuration at a point in time, serving as a stable reference for development, testing, and release.

Baselining is important because it gives you a known state to compare against when evaluating changes, enables reproducible builds, supports verification and audits, and helps maintain overall configuration integrity across the lifecycle. The best answer emphasizes that CM manages baselines and changes to work products to preserve configuration integrity. Other options diverge from CM’s primary purpose: measuring quality data is more about quality assurance, and governing supplier contracts relates to procurement.