Software Engineering

16.4.3 
Appraise the project situation
The status of change assimilation must be evaluated within the total project situ-
ation. The status of software engineering tasks that involve the assimilation of 
a change package should be given special attention due to their volatile circum-
stances. When all of the tasks for a given change assimilation are completed, a final 
audit of the change integration into the software architecture should be accom-
plished. When the final audit has been satisfied, then the change can be classified as 
satisfied and transitioned to the change history repository.
Architectural versioning should identify the set of change requests and propos-
als that are addressed by each engineering version of the software architecture and 
its artifacts. This implies that the evolution of the software architecture definition 
must be under technical version control. All engineering artifacts must be aligned 
with some version of the architecture. This enables all software specifications, dia-
grams, drawings, documents, and models to be associated with one or more ver-
sions of the software product architecture. The synchronization of the software 
engineering tasks and the architecture definition and its artifacts must be a funda-
mental software engineering practice. It is necessary to understand the engineer-
ing evolution of the software architecture to account for the changes that promoted 
each version of the software product.