Configuration Management's goal is to facilitate the lives of developers, quality assurance personnel, management, and operational personnel by providing them with the tools and automation necessary to track and implement additional changes and configurations for a target system. The general logic flow of Configuration Management goes something like this:
If I spend four hours configuring a given development system for a developer to use, and then the developer quits the next day, and a new developer gets hired, I have just wasted eight hours. Whereas if I spend eight hours writing a single set of automated scripts to automatically provision a development system and the automation takes 20 minutes to run from start to finish, I can now recreate the developer system easily and with minimal fuss and ceremony.
On a very basic level, this...
