Create or release baselines for internal use and for delivery to the customer.

A baseline is a set of specifications or work products that has been formally reviewed and agreed on, that thereafter serves as the basis for further development or delivery, and that can be changed only through change control procedures. A baseline represents the assignment of an identifier to a configuration item or a collection of configuration items and associated entities. As a product evolves, several baselines may be used to control its development and testing.

For Systems Engineering

One common set of baselines includes the system-level requirements, system-element-level design requirements, and the product definition at the end of development/beginning of production. These are typically referred to as the “functional baseline,” “allocated baseline,” and “product baseline.”

For Software Engineering

A software baseline can be a set of requirements, design, source code files and the associated executable code, build files, and user documentation (associated entities) that have been assigned a unique identifier.

Typical Work Products

1.    Baselines

2.    Description of baselines

Subpractices

1.    Obtain authorization from the configuration control board (CCB) before creating or releasing baselines of configuration items.

2.    Create or release baselines only from configuration items in the configuration management system.

3.    Document the set of configuration items that are contained in a baseline.

4.    Make the current set of baselines readily available.