Change Control and Version Control are NOT THE SAME THING

And now to one of my pet annoyances…

Change Control is a formal process used to ensure a product, service or process is only modified in line with the identified necessary change. – Wikipedia - change control

Revision control (also known as version control, source control or (source) code management (SCM)) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information. – Wikipedia - revision control

As you can tell from the different definitions these two terms do not mean the same thing. They are not interchangeable and, ideally, both should be present. If you’re maintaining multiple versions of source code or config files then you have version control. Not change control.

This rant was bought to you by over half the places I’ve worked. Ggggggrrrrrrrrhhhhhhh!