Limiting GCM contributions by enforcing project area associations

To limit which project areas team members see when they add local or global configurations to global streams or set their configuration context in applications such as the Requirements Management (RM) or Quality Management (QM) applications, you can configure the Global Configuration Management (GCM) application to enforce project area associations.

About this task

By default, project area associations are not enforced and all accessible configuration-enabled project areas of friend servers are shown. When team members set their configuration context or add configurations to global streams (if they have permission), they can choose configurations from any project area that they belong to.

Consider a scenario where Team1 is working in a GCM project area for a car. Separate components represent items in the car, such as cruise control, engine, and infotainment system.

Team2 is working in a separate GCM project area for a truck, and Team3 is working in a separate GCM project area for a hybrid-powered car.

In this example, the following applications are registered to a Jazz Team Server, and each application has several project areas:

For each IBM® Engineering Lifecycle Management application, the configuration leads confirm which project areas contain configurations that their teams need.

Not all the project areas are relevant to each other. For example, the team that works on the hybrid-powered car doesn't need configurations from the truck. To limit the options that team members have when they build configuration hierarchies, in each GCM project area (GCM-Car, GCM-Truck, and GCM-Hybrid), you can define the following project area associations (Uses - Configurations) to each project area that contributes or might contribute configurations.

Note: When you add the Uses - Configurations association from a GCM project area to another project area, the corresponding Provides - Configurations is added automatically in the other project area.

After you set up the project area associations and configure the GCM instance to enforce the associations, these changes occur:

• The Add Configurations dialog box in GCM shows only the project areas that have a Provides - Configurations association to the project area of the selected configuration.
• The Select the Configuration Context dialog box for setting a global configuration context in other applications (such as the RM and QM applications) shows GCM project areas where there is a direct or indirect (transitive) Uses - Configurations association to the current project area.

1. Go to the GCM application's Administration page at https://hostname:port/gc/admin, and click Project Areas > Active Project Areas on the banner.
2. For each project area in the list, determine the project area associations that you must create based on present and anticipated contributions.
   1. To identify the project area associations based on the present contributions between project areas, run the SPARQL query that is provided on the Global Configuration Management - Project Area Associations wiki.
   2. Ask configuration leads which project areas might contribute configurations to the current project area in the future.
3. For each project area in the list, add the project area associations based on your findings from step 2.
   Note: You must complete this step before you complete step 5. Otherwise, team members cannot see the configurations that they need in configuration pickers, and in the Select the Configuration Context dialog box when they set the configuration context.
   1. Click a project area name.
   2. In the Associations section, click Add.
   3. In the Add Association dialog box, select the application that contains the project areas to access.
   4. On the Association menu, click Uses - Configurations.
      A corresponding Provides - Configurations association is added in the other project area.
   5. Select a project area and click OK.
   6. Repeat steps 3.b to 3.e to add more project areas.
   7. Click Save.
4. Open the GCM application's Advanced Properties page. On the banner, click Application, and then click Advanced Properties.
5. Set the Project area associations are required for contributions property to true, and then click Save.
6. Stop and restart the GCM application.
7. Stop and restart each application that you added in step 3.c.

   You must restart this GCM and all Jazz applications that use it when you change the Project area associations are required for contributions property as described in step 5. You must not restart an application when you add or remove only project area association from the list.

   Note: If you install other applications that contribute to global configurations and the Project area associations are required for contributions property is not set to its default value (false), you must restart those new applications after you register them.