Enabling QM project areas to use baselines

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This topic applies to the Quality Management (QM) application. By enabling baselines, you can capture the version of all the artifacts that support versioning at one time, instead of taking snapshots of individual artifacts. You can more easily compare project area states, and revert to earlier versions of artifacts.

Before you begin

  • You must be a project area administrator.
  • 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 cannot disable this option after you enable it. However, you can enable multi-stream configuration management later if you want to do multi-stream development and use components, and optionally add baselines and streams to global configurations. See the related topic.

About this task

A baseline is a frozen collection of artifacts. Baselines are useful for capturing the state of a project area at a specific time. Neither the set of versions nor the artifacts can be changed. You can switch your view to a baseline, but you can't delete any items within the baseline. If you permanently delete an item in the Trash view, that item is deleted from the baseline (as it is for snapshots). A stream is a modifiable collection of artifacts.

In the QM application, baselines capture the version of many QM artifact types, but some types do not support versioning. For details, see the related topic.

In project areas enabled for baselines, you work with all the artifacts from a project area in one stream, and create baselines as needed to capture artifact versions at milestones or critical points in a release.

To manage cross-project links, each application stores a copy of the link to the other's artifact (back links). This is the same behavior as project areas that aren't enabled for configuration management.
Tip: If you need to link to artifacts in RM project areas that are enabled for configuration management, you must enable this QM project area for configuration management as well. For details, see Enabling configuration management in project areas.

Procedure

You can enable a project area for baselines in the following ways:
Option Description
From a project area administration page
  1. Go to the application administration page: https://fully_qualified_host_name:9443/qm/admin
  2. On the toolbar, click Project Areas > Active Project Areas.
  3. Click the name of the project area that requires baselines to be enabled.
  4. Click Configuration Management.
  5. On the Configuration Management page, click Enable only baselines; then, click Enable Baselines.
From a project area
  1. Click Administration Administration menu > Manage This Project Area.
  2. Click Configuration Management.
  3. On the Configuration Management page, click Enable only baselines; then, click Enable Baselines.

What to do next

You can now create baselines to capture the versions of artifacts in the project area. As more baselines are created, you can compare previous states of the project area, and replace the current version of an artifact with an earlier version. See the related topic about managing baselines.