8. Change Tracking¶

The general compliance document can only justify the identification and traceability of the Ferrocene toolchain up to the point of the delivery to the customer; it is the responsibility of the customer to complete it with project-specific evidence for the post-delivery period.

All Ferrocene-related artifacts, including the code base, test suites, documentation, qualification material, and releases are hosted on GitHub and Amazon S3. As a result, every change to any of these artifacts is tracked, and every commit yields a complete and validated snapshot of Ferrocene.

The source code of the Ferrocene toolchain and the source code of our validation infrastructure are placed under configuration management using git. Each release of the Ferrocene toolchain is uniquely identified by a symbolic name. In order to manage the complexity of the development process, different branches are used (see Merge Strategy for full details). It is therefore possible to know precisely the contents of each of the releases, and to have parallel development on new targets or with specialized requirements.

The Ferrocene toolchain maintains several artifacts that track the changes between stable releases. New features that have been introduced in a stable release are documented in the Ferrocene Release Notes. New KPs that have been identified and existing KPs that have been fixed in stable releases are documented in the ferrocene/problems repository.

Once a new stable release is produced, an announcement is published on the Ferrous Systems blog. In addition, customers will receive email communication whenever new KPs are discovered, or a release fixing KPs is published.