Therefore, it is extremely important to develop a structured and standardized approach to change management early in the project. Likewise, a portfolio of advanced harness development tools can provide elegant solutions. The integrated device transport database discussed earlier can enforce some change control mechanisms. With these enhancements, the database immediately provides the necessary structure and automatic change management.
A device’s release engineer can draft a device transfer directly in the database and submit it for approval. Once approved, changes are automatically updated in the logic schematic. This eliminates the error-prone process of manually updating the schematic from an Excel file. It also prevents release engineers from making changes to outdated local copies found on their hard drives, as well as overwriting changes made to device transfers since the last update. Finally, for each set of published logic schematics, an automatically generated change request checklist is implemented in each release, linking each change back to a specific harness revision for future reference.