Comparing and merging versions of artifacts

From the graphical view that shows the versions of an artifact, you can compare two versions, and merge changes among versions.

Before you begin

The project must be enabled for configuration management.
Understand how your organization uses streams, baselines, and change sets based on how many teams need to work in parallel on different versions of the same artifacts. To learn more, see Patterns for stream usage on Jazz.net.

To learn more about configuration management and local configurations, see Getting started with configuration management.

Open the artifact in an editor.

Note: See the "Versionable artifacts" column in this topic for the list of artifacts that you can compare from the graphical view.
In the Section pane, click Versions.
Click or hover over a version of the artifact and select an action:

Tip: To reduce the clutter on the page, click Show Only Versions Selected by Configurations on the toolbar. See the related topic for details.
- Compare to another version: Click the compare icon. In the compare editor, click the section names in the left navigation to see differences between the versions.
- Merge changes from another version: Click the merge icon. In the merge editor, accept the changes from the sections that support the accept or merge actions and save your changes.
  Tip: The accept and merge actions are not available for some of the sections such as the Formal Review section and the general artifact attributes. These sections can be manually edited for the current version. To revert the changes to an earlier version, see Replace with source option in Merging configurations in the QM application.
To understand how differences are highlighted in the Comparison editor, see the related topic about compare and merge operations.

The system creates a new version of the artifact each time someone saves changes to it, and updates the graph to show the new version.