Getting started with configuration management

Configuration management capabilities in the IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management enable multi-stream development, artifact reuse, and linking to artifacts across project areas. For the Quality Management (QM) and Requirements Management (RM) applications, a Jazz administrator must have an activation key. The administrator must activate this feature at the application level, and then enable individual QM and RM project areas. After you enable these capabilities for a project area, you cannot disable them.

Use configuration management capabilities to create versions of artifacts and link them to other team artifacts, such as requirements and designs. Use configurations (streams and baselines) from Engineering Lifecycle Management applications to manage reuse, traceability, and parallel development. Use the Global Configuration Management (GCM) application to assemble configurations into global configurations to provide a context for resolving links between versioned artifacts within and across Engineering Lifecycle Management applications.

To learn more about configuration management, watch the following videos:

Teams use their configuration management-enabled Engineering Lifecycle Management applications to contribute requirements, designs, tests, and global configurations to a larger working environment. Global configurations assemble contributed configurations in a hierarchical tree view. Use global configurations to plan and manage the reuse of configurations in the many versions or variants of your software or product line.

In the Change and Configuration Management (CCM) application, you must complete the steps to be able to link work items to versioned artifacts in RM and QM project areas. For more information, see Linking work items to artifacts in configuration management-enabled project areas.

Before your team can use these capabilities, the following actions are necessary:

To read more about local configurations, global configurations, and how to use them together, see Configurations: Global and local.

To know more details, read about Best practices for configuration management in IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (Engineering Lifecycle Management).

The following diagram shows a simplified workflow for configuration management. Click a box in the diagram to see more information about a high-level configuration management task.
Note:
  • For the Install > Install Engineering Lifecycle Management task: if your project links to artifacts in other Engineering Lifecycle Management applications, you must install the Link Index Provider supporting application. If you project will use global configurations, make sure you install the Link Index Provider and GCM applications.
  • For the Change and Configuration Management (CCM) > Analyze the impact of a requested change task: this task refers to the process of understanding which development artifacts, such as code libraries, user interface, and so on, are affected by changes. In the CCM application, there is no tool to run to complete this task.
The image shows high-level steps for using configuration management capabilities. Click for more about installing Engineering Lifecycle Management Click for more about upgrading Engineering Lifecycle Management Click for more about activating configuration management capabilities in Engineering Lifecycle Management applications Enabling configuration management in project areas (QM and RM applications) Creating a component to establish a work context Managing configurations Click for more about enabling linking between Engineering Workflow Management work items and versioned artifacts Click for more about creating configurations in Engineering Lifecycle Management project areas Click for more about creating a stream to work in Click for more about switching to a configuration to work in Click for more about optionally creating change sets to group your changes Click for more about creating and editing artifacts in the RM application Click for more about cross-application linking to versioned artifacts after enabling configuration management in RM and QM project areas Click for more about working with multiple change sets in a personal stream Click for more about making your changes visible by delivering your change sets Click for more about comparing configurations Click for more about reusing artifacts by delivering change sets to other streams Click for more about creating baselines Click for more about creating a stream to work in Click for more about switching to a configuration to work in Click for more about creating and managing test artifacts Click for more about cross-application linking to versioned artifacts after enabling configuration management in RM and QM project areas Click for more about comparing and reusing test artifacts by merging configurations Click for more about planning the project Click for more about creating tasks or change requests Click for more about linking to artifacts that are affected by the change Click for more about linking tasks to change sets Click for more about creating Engineering Workflow Management streams to work in Click for more about creating baselines to capture the state of work for a release Click for more about showing versioned artifact information in dashboard widgets Click for more about exploring ready-made reports in Report Builder Click for more about creating traceability reports on data from across projects by using Report Builder Click for more about generating document-style reports from Report Builder content