Understand the impact of enabling configuration management

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Before you enable configuration management capabilities for a project area, you must understand how it affects a project area and its links to artifacts in other project areas. After you enable these capabilities, you cannot disable them.

Important:
Before your team can use configuration management capabilities, read this information and the following article about considerations before enabling configuration management. After you read the article, you can obtain an activation key:
  • For pilot environments, generate an activation key at https://jazz.net/products/clm/cm/get-key.
    Note: The configuration management capabilities of the RM, QM, and Global Configuration Management applications are added services for IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management Base SaaS and IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management Extended SaaS customer environments and must be enabled only by the SaaS provider. The source-control management (SCM) feature in CCM is included in Cloud offerings at no additional cost.
  • For production environments, discuss your plans with your IBM Client representative or contact IBM Support.
Starting in version 6.0.1, only integrations with the following products support versioned artifacts:
  • IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS® Next (DOORS Next)
  • IBM Engineering Test Management (ETM)
  • IBM Engineering Systems Design Rhapsody® - Model Manager (RMM)
  • IBM Engineering Workflow Management (EWM)

    External integrations to EWM work items continue to work as expected since work items are not versioned.

After you understand the behaviors and limitations that are associated with enabling configuration management, and you have an activation key, you can activate configuration management for the DOORS Next (RM) and ETM (QM) applications. Then, you can enable the configuration management capabilities in RM and QM project areas and AM project areas. You cannot 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 would lose any changes that were made in all project areas, managed by that server.

See the following sections for application or product-specific considerations.

All ELM applications

If you plan to use ELM products in global configurations with other products, these considerations are applicable. If you want to use the ELM products as stand-alone products (without linking to other applications), the information available here does not apply.
  • If you need to keep some applications at a version earlier than 6.0, defer enabling configuration management until they all can be upgraded.
  • All ELM applications must be at the same version 6 level.
  • For the linked QM or RM project areas, if you cannot enable configuration management for all of the project areas, do not enable it for any of them. Project areas that are enabled for configurations cannot be associated with any other project areas that are not enabled for configurations. For example, if your RM project area is linked to a QM project area, or even to another RM project area, you cannot enable one and not the other. Links between the projects become non-editable, and links to any artifacts in the enabled project would resolve only to the default configuration. This behavior does not apply if you link from RM or QM project areas to either RMM or EWM. You must decide holistically for related project areas. Project areas that are not associated are not affected, and do not have to be enabled.
    Note: In EWM and RMM, no additional steps are needed to activate configuration management.

    Ensure that you consider all project area relationships because cascading links might exist. For example, RM Project Area A links to RM Project Area B, which links to QM Project Area C.

  • Linking behavior changes, all links go in one direction. Back links are removed, and are no longer stored with the target artifact. In project areas that are not enabled for configurations, links across project areas are managed by each application by storing a copy of the link to the other application's artifact. This process is called back linking. When you enable configuration management, only the source application stores the link details, and any existing back links are removed. The link direction determines where the link is stored, and most links are managed by the Link Index Provider (LDX). To view the links across project areas after you enable configuration management, you must set the current configuration in the context of a global configuration that contains the corresponding local configurations. You must understand the implications of these changes as described in Links across project areas after enabling configuration management. To learn more about global configurations, see Workflow for global configurations.
  • If you rely on synchronization or Open Services Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) integrations to relate data in ELM project areas to data in tools that do not support the OASIS OSLC Configuration Management specification, defer enabling configuration management for those project areas until those integrations are supported. Links to tools outside of ELM are inconsistent until those integrations are updated to be compatible with configuration-enabled projects. It includes IBM tools, tools from other vendors, and custom OSLC integrations, such as those created by using the SDK from the Eclipse Lyo project.

DOORS Next (RM)

The following considerations apply to configuration-enabled projects:
  • Existing baselines in DOORS Next become baseline configurations when you enable configuration management.
    Note: Starting in version 6.0, if you start your project without enabling configuration management but enable it later, you can use the baselines that you created. It might not always be desirable, especially if your type system was changed significantly over time.

    If you don’t want the baselines to become configurations, archive them before you enable configuration management.

  • Projects that are enabled for configuration management stop their data feeds to the data warehouse, and their data is archived there. All configuration-specific data is stored in the lifecycle index and is accessed by using the Lifecycle Query Engine (LQE) application. See the Reporting section for details.
  • You can create, display, and delete these link types from AM project areas: Derives Architecture Element, Refined by Architecture Element, Traced by Architecture Element, and Satisfied by Architecture Element.
  • You can use change sets in the following two ways:
    • By using named change sets. Create explicit, named change sets to easily group the related changes, and deliver changes across streams. For some organizations, this practice is essential as part of the development process. If your organization is using global configurations, when you create a change set, it is automatically added to your personal stream. You can then edit links to artifacts in other RM, QM, or AM repositories.

      You must make manual edits to resolve conflicting change sets. It includes any two change sets that change a module structure (add, remove, or reorder the artifacts in a module).

    • By using automatic change sets. The RM application provides automatic change sets that are created by the system when a change to an artifact or link is saved. You can modify links across applications and RM artifacts, and the system creates and delivers the change set in one atomic action. You can deliver a potentially large set of these changes to another stream, but it is a complex operation in version 6 releases.
    For more information about change sets, see Managing changes to artifacts.
  • Suspect link traceability is replaced with link validity status on links between artifacts. To see this information, enable the option to show link validity status. To understand how link validity helps to achieve consistency across artifacts and links as artifacts change, see link validity topic.
  • Links to RM artifacts from external sources (for example, on a wiki page or from external applications that don’t support configurations) must include configuration context to ensure they resolve correctly. If the link does not specify the configuration, DOORS Next displays the target artifact in the default configuration (the initial stream). If the default configuration does not include that artifact, an error is shown.
  • After you enable configuration management, you cannot add ELM links within a rich-text artifact because the resolution mechanism uses back links. If a project already has such links when configuration is enabled, it doesn't resolve correctly. So, you can remove such links by using the Links side bar of the artifact, or the remove link option in the rich text editor.
  • The Requirements Tracing widget does not show results.
  • You cannot create links in a baseline. However, you can create links to artifacts in that baseline from the artifacts in streams and in EWM. Such links are stored with the source artifacts; they appear in the baseline, but they do not modify the baseline artifacts. For more information about link management and link ownership, see Links across project areas after enabling configuration management.
  • In IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS (DOORS), starting from version 9.7, the restriction for linking to DOORS from a configuration enabled RM or QM application is removed. The integration is possible by using Open Services Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC). In DOORS, you can opt in a module to be configuration aware. Modules that are not opted in would ignore the version information that is provided on OSLC requests as it would happen in pre-9.7 versions. For more information, see Integration of DOORS and Global Configurations.
  • You must re-create any artifact templates that refer to deleted artifacts or collections.
For more information about these behaviors, see the DOORS Next release notes for this release on Jazz.net.

In project areas that are not enabled for configurations, the default configuration is the stream that the New project wizard creates by default, and it is the only stream in a project.

ETM (QM)

The following considerations apply to configuration-enabled projects:
  • Projects that are enabled for configuration management stop their data feeds to the data warehouse, and their data is archived there. All configuration-specific data is stored in the lifecycle index and is accessed by using the Lifecycle Query Engine (LQE) application. See the Reporting section for details.
  • New dashboard widgets are added that support configurations. ETM dashboard gadgets based on BIRT are not available. You can also create custom widgets with Report Builder or create custom HTML widgets with links to IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization - Engineering Insights (ENI) views. Update settings of your dashboard widgets that need to refer to specific configurations.
  • Filtering on development item and development plan links are not supported.
  • You cannot create snapshots to capture artifact versions. Take baselines instead. Baselines capture the current version of all the artifacts that can be versioned in a project area. To understand which artifacts can be versioned, see Versioned artifacts in configurations in this help topic.
  • Existing snapshots become read-only. Snapshots display OSLC links to requirements, but not links to work items.
  • You cannot create links in a baseline. However, you can create links to artifacts in that baseline from the artifacts in streams and in EWM. Such links are stored with the source artifacts; they appear in the baseline, but they do not modify the baseline artifacts.

EWM (CCM)

  • To browse or create links to versioned artifacts, you must use the web client. It means the EWM client for Eclipse IDE (6.0 or later versions), or the EWM client for Microsoft Visual Studio IDE (6.0 or later versions).
  • In general, linking EWM plans to versioned artifacts is not supported.
  • Links to versioned artifacts are not supported in the following views:
    • History section of the work item editor.
    • My Activities or My Subscriptions section in the Quick Planner.
    • Dashboard viewlets that show change events.
    • Feeds (EWM client for Eclipse IDE and EWM client for Microsoft Visual Studio IDE).
    • Links section of a plan.
  • You can link work items to versioned artifacts only if the configurations that contain those versioned artifacts belong to global configurations.
  • To specify the mapping of OSLC link types to attributes, and to associate releases with global configurations, you must use the web client. For more information, see Enabling linking of work items to versioned artifacts.
  • While you are working in ETM or DOORS Next, you cannot create a link from a baseline to a work item. Instead, create the link from within the work item.
  • When you change the value of release field (deliverable attribute type) associated with a work item, you must save the changes to affect the links to versioned artifacts.
  • ELM includes a set of predefined lifecycle work item queries, which retrieve work items based on their links to artifacts in other applications, such as RM and QM. See Using lifecycle queries for the complete list of these queries. For work items that are linked to versioned RM and QM artifacts that do not belong to default configurations, the lifecycle query results might not be accurate.
  • Data warehouse reporting is not supported for links to versioned artifacts.

For more information about configuring a project area so that you can link work items to specific versions of artifacts in other applications such as QM and RM, see Enabling linking of work items to versioned artifacts.

Global Configuration Management (GCM)

In the following points, a global configuration provider is the GCM application that your deployment uses.
  • An ELM deployment can have one global configuration provider only. However, you can configure a global configuration provider to accept contributions from another global configuration provider. For more information, see Enabling GCM servers to contribute configurations to other GCM servers.
  • You can create reports with information about global configurations by using ENI and Report Builder. When you build your report, select the appropriate data source.

Reporting

Consider these limitations when you are reporting on data in configurations. For more information, see Getting started with reporting by using Lifecycle Query Engine data sources on Jazz.net.
  • Enabling configuration management in RM and QM project areas stops their feeds to the ELM data warehouse and archives the data there. EWM does populate the data warehouse, but that data does not include configuration-related information. So, you cannot report on versioned artifacts and configuration-enabled project areas by using the data warehouse.
  • All configuration-specific data is stored in the lifecycle index and is accessed by using the Lifecycle Query Engine (LQE) application. The Report Builder and ENI can report from the lifecycle index by using an LQE scoped by a configuration data source.
    Note: The name of the data source for reporting on versioned artifacts in configurations varies depending on your version of Jazz® Reporting Service, but the meaning is the same:
    • If you create the LQE data sources in Report Builder version 6.0.3, it's called LQE scoped by a configuration, and you can rename it.
    • If you upgrade from version 6.0.2 or earlier, it's called LQE using Configurations, and you can rename it.
  • LQE supports a limited number of historical trends and metrics as of version 6.0.3.
  • Link types and attributes for DOORS Next are duplicated. In the Traceability links section, hover over the question mark Question mark inside a square speech balloon to identify the project that the attribute is from. You must set a condition for each attribute with the same name; then, group them and add an OR relationship between them. To show them in one column when you run the report, in the Format section, give them the same column name.