This document regulates how changes are made to Chemwatch software products. The process applies for the changes bigger than 3 days in size, as well as changes having significant user impact and risks related to releasing them to the public.
Change authority is a person or a group of people responsible for authorizing a change.
| Position | Level of authorization |
|---|---|
| CEO | Ultimate change authority. |
| Stakeholdes | Can pre-approve a change, but require CEO's review and sign off. |
| Everyone else | Can suggest a change. |
The following aspects have to be reviewed when allowing a change:
Reviewers:
There are two possible sources of changes:
Internal requests require CEO approval to be started.
External requests are reviewed every 3 months by Stakeholders to decide whether the change is reasonable to do.
Some changes can be escalated by Helpdesk, Customer support, QA, or Development team. In this case, the CEO's decision is necessary to move on with the change.
In case when a change can affect user experience, the clients must be notified. We have the following means of notification available:
The timeliness of notification is ad-hoc and decided based on the nature of change and impact. The notification requirements is a part of release and deployment plan, written for every sizable update.
The notification text and images should be created by Stakeholder immediatelly after completing the requirements.
This includes:
For some parts, a change cannot be made until the form and date of it is agreed on by the client. Check Supporting Documents section for more information |
Production change is usually an ad-hoc process, depending on what change is planned. For example, Database upgrade procedure and corresponding risk assesment may be quite different from upgrading OS or .NET version. In any case, each upgrade (change) to the environment happens in these steps: