Enabling configuration management in project areas (QM and DOORS applications)

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This topic applies only to the Engineering Test Management and Requirements Management (RM) applications. To participate in multi-stream development, use components, and to reuse versioned artifacts in different configurations, an application administrator must enable configuration management capabilities for that project area. After you enable this capability for a project area, you cannot disable it.

Before you begin

  • You must be a project area administrator.
  • You should understand configuration management concepts. See Getting started with configuration management.
  • Back up existing repositories before you enable configuration management capabilities. If you restore from a backup, you will lose any changes that were made in all project areas managed by that server.
  • You should understand the effects of enabling configuration management. Then:
    • For pilot environments, generate an activation key using Enabling configurations in ELM 7.1 applications.
      Note: The configuration management capabilities of the RM, QM, and Global Configuration Management applications are added services for IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management as SaaS and IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management SaaS customer environments and must be enabled only by the SaaS provider. The source-control management (SCM) feature in Engineering Workflow Management is included in Cloud offerings at no additional cost.
    • For production environments, discuss your plans with your IBM Client representative or contact IBM Support.
  • Using the generated activation key, a Jazz® Team Server administrator must activate configuration management for this IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management application.

About this task

This procedure applies to the Engineering Test Management and DOORS applications.

After you enable a project area for configuration management, you cannot disable it. There is no way to reverse the action after you enable a project area. Back up existing repositories before you enable configuration management capabilities. If you restore from a backup, you will lose any changes that were made in all project areas managed by that server.

If Engineering Test Management or Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next project areas are linked to other QM, RM, and Architecture Management (AM) project areas, enable either all of the linked projects or none of them. Enabling only one of the linked projects is not practical for more than a short transition period. You can't create links between enabled and non-enabled project areas. Existing links will become uneditable; you can traverse from versioned to unversioned artifacts, but linking from non-versioned to versioned artifacts will resolve only to the default configuration. In general, for applications that support configurations, if project areas are linked, you should enable either all or none of the linked project areas..

If you do not enable configuration management for a project area, you can still create baselines (in the DOORS application) or snapshots or baselines (in the Engineering Test Management application) at important project milestones, but you cannot include them in global configurations. For the Engineering Test Management application, see Enabling project areas to use baselines.

Engineering Test Management application only:
  • If you enable this capability in a project that already has snapshots, existing snapshots do not change. You cannot change them or add them to global configurations. To see them, open a test plan, test case, test suite, or test script; then, click Snapshots below the list of sections.
  • If you enable this capability in a project that is already enabled for baselines, you can complete the same tasks on the project's initial component and stream, and the baselines that you created, as you can on new components, streams, and baselines. If your team uses global configurations, a configuration lead can add streams and baselines from this project to global configurations.
  • 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 .

DOORS application only: If you enable this capability in a project that already has baselines, existing baselines do not change. You see them when you open a stream in the stream editor and click on the Baselines tab. You can complete the same tasks with existing baselines as you can on new baselines. If your team uses global configurations, a configuration lead can add streams and baselines from this project to global configurations.

Procedure

You can enable configuration management from a project area administration page or in a project area.
Option Description
From a project area administration page
  1. Go to the application administration page: https://fully_qualified_host_name:9443/application_context_root/admin
  2. On the toolbar, click Project Areas > Active Project Areas.
  3. Click the name of the project that requires configuration management capabilities.
  4. Click Configuration Management.
  5. QM only: On the Configuration Management page, click the Enable full configuration management radio button.
  6. Click Enable Configuration Management near the bottom of the page. Follow any prompts.
From a project area
  1. Click Administration Administration menu > Manage This Project Area.
  2. Click Configuration Management.
  3. QM only: On the Configuration Management page, click the Enable full configuration management radio button.
  4. Click Enable Configuration Management near the bottom of the page. Follow any prompts.

What to do next

After you enable configuration management, see the changes on the toolbar:
  • Current Project Component menu: Switch between components in the current project.
  • Current Configuration menu: Team members with configuration management permissions can use this menu to switch to other configurations, and create configurations (streams and baselines) to manage sets of versioned artifacts, so that teams can work in parallel on artifacts in different streams. For Engineering Lifecycle Management applications that use change sets, you can initiate actions on them from this menu.
Team members with configuration management privileges can click Administration Administration menu > Manage Components and Configurations to complete these tasks:
  • View and navigate the hierarchy of streams in a project area.
  • Complete configuration-related tasks such as creating and comparing configurations, and changing names and descriptions.
  • For the DOORS application, you can initiate change set actions from this menu.

The configurations in this project area can be grouped with configurations from this project area and other Engineering Lifecycle Management applications to give you a view of all the artifacts (such as requirements, source code, and test artifacts) that are associated with a product version. These groupings of configurations are called global configurations. To work with global configurations, some setup is required. For details, see Getting started with global configurations.

In the Engineering Test Management application, you can now set preferences related to configuration management, such as when to exclude test results when creating configurations, merging them, or cloning artifacts. For details, see Setting configuration management preferences in the Engineering Test Management application.

In the Engineering Workflow Management application, there are steps that you must complete to enable linking of work items to versioned artifacts in Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next and Engineering Test Management project areas. For details, see Linking work items to artifacts in configuration management-enabled project areas.