Workflow for using configurations in projects

Understand the workflow for using configurations to work in parallel versions of a product or system, and create hierarchical structures of configurations from IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management applications to represent components of your product or system.

Before you begin

Administrators, project leads, and configuration leads should read these items:
- Best practices for configuration management in IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
An administrator with JazzAdmin privileges activates configuration management capabilities for the IBM DOORS Next and Engineering Test Management applications.
A configuration lead or team member with Jazz project area administration privileges must enable configuration management capabilities in Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next and Engineering Test Management project areas that require teams to work in parallel.
Optional: To create hierarchical structures of configurations from Engineering Lifecycle Management applications, you must have the Global Configuration application installed.
Engineering Test Management application only: If your team doesn't do multi-stream development, and doesn't use components and global configurations, you can enable a project area to use only baselines: work in one stream and take baselines as needed to capture artifact versions at milestones or critical points in a release. See Enabling Engineering Test Management project areas to use baselines .

Procedure

A configuration lead completes these steps:
1. Optional: In each project area, if no baseline exists as a starting point for the team to do their work, creates the baseline from the initial stream. Creating a baseline freezes the set of versioned artifacts at a point in time, so it is clear which versions of artifacts were used when development started.
2. Create a stream for the team to work in.
In each lifecycle application, team members do their work, which includes these actions:
1. Select a stream to work in.
2. DOORS application: Create a change set to group your changes and new artifacts. Some projects enforce the use of change sets, and might also enforce linking them to approved work items.
  - If your team uses global configurations, the change set is automatically added to your personal stream. This stream is created automatically if it didn't already exist. See workflow for global configurations.
3. In the Global Configuration Management application, add other configurations that you need from the lifecycle applications, to the personal stream.
4. Create and update artifacts. For example, update a system requirement, and associate it with a test case.
5. Compare how your configuration differs from another. For example, you might compare your change set to the baseline it was created from to see how it has changed; or you might compare your change set to the destination stream to see how they differ.
6. Deliver the changes to the stream.
7. Accept changes from the parent stream.
Capture the version of resources used at a milestone or at critical points in a release by creating a baseline of a stream. Work can continue on this stream. For new versions or releases, create new streams from a baseline.
Optional: Create reports so that you can view data for a configuration in your Jazz dashboards. For example, you might create a report that shows test plans and test cases for a specific configuration, and then add that report to your dashboard. In this release, reporting on configuration-enabled projects is available with limitations. See Getting started with reporting by using Lifecycle Query Engine data sources on Jazz®.net.
Configuration leads or team members with configuration management permissions can create global streams and add local configurations from lifecycle applications to them. Global configurations give you a view of all the artifacts in a product variant. See workflow for global configurations.
These team members can also complete these actions:
- Branch them to create new development streams
- Extend them to include other configurations.