Configuration management in the RM application

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Use configuration management in the Requirements Management (RM) application to manage components, streams, baselines, and change sets, to compare configurations, and to complete other configuration management tasks.

This high-level overview briefly describes the configuration management capabilities in the RM application. For comprehensive and task-related information, see Getting started with configuration management.

Before your team can use configuration management capabilities, an administrator must read the considerations for enabling configuration management, and then obtain an activation key:

For pilot environments, read the considerations and generate an activation key.
Note: Configuration management capabilities of RM and QM, and global configuration management is an added service for IBM® Engineering Lifecycle Management ase SaaS and IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management SaaS customer environments, and must be enabled only by the SaaS provider. Software configuration management (SCM) 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.

Use the configuration management capabilities in the RM application to set up unique working environments for individuals or teams. For example, you can create components to represent collections of artifacts, instead of working with all the artifacts from the project in one stream. You can create streams and baselines of projects at specific points in time, review and approve changes to artifacts, and make changes visible to other teams or individuals. You can also enable link validity in a configuration management enabled project.

Streams and baselines are referred to as configurations. You can create and view baselines in a project even if you do not have configuration management enabled. However, after you enable a project for configuration management, the Current Configuration menu contains configuration-related options that you can use to create and compare baselines and streams, and optionally create change sets, as seen in this example:

Current Configuration menu in an expanded state

Streams, baselines, and change sets in configuration management

A stream is a configuration in which you create and modify artifacts at a specific development level. For example, you might create a stream when you start a new release or branch of a design, project, or product.

A baseline is an immutable configuration that provides a snapshot of your project at a specific point in time. Baselines are useful for capturing the state of a stream, and are typically used to record important stream configurations so that they can be re-created. When you create a new stream, a baseline of the previous stream is created automatically.

A change set is a grouping of changes that remains separate from the stream in which it was created until you deliver the change set to the stream. After you deliver your change set to the originating stream, you can then deliver the change set to other streams. Using change sets is an optional but convenient way to track and deliver changes in your development environment.

The name of the stream, baseline, or change set that you select to work in is shown at the top of the Current Configuration menu. For example, if you create and switch to a baseline called My Baseline, it appears on the Current Configuration menu, as shown in this example:

Current Configuration menu that shows a configuration named My Baseline

To work in a different configuration, expand the Current Configuration menu, click Switch, click Requirements Management Configuration and search for another configuration in which to work. You can also switch to a Global Configuration Management from this menu.

When you first create a project, an initial component and stream are automatically created that manage the artifact versioning information for the project. You can create more components to organize artifacts based on your project needs. To manage components and configurations, from the Administration menu, select Manage Components and Configurations.

The streams in a component are shown on the Component window, on the Streams tab, based on their relationship to each other:

Configuration window that shows a hierarchy of streams

Tip:

To see the baselines that were created in a stream, click the stream and then click the Baselines tab. To compare the contents of two streams, select the streams and click Compare .
If your team uses global configurations, you can create a baseline of an RM stream from the configuration tree view in the Global Configuration Management (GCM) application. See Creating baselines of streams contributed by other IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management applications.

If you are working in a parallel development environment, you might have individual streams whose contents are derived from a common stream. To make changes in your stream visible to other team members, you deliver your changes to the common stream, which also known as the flow target. From the common stream, team members can accept changes into their own streams to ensure that they have the most recent versions of artifacts.

The hierarchy of the streams in the component indicates the flow target for streams. For example, if you create a Release 1.1 stream from a Release 1.0 stream, the streams are shown as follows:

Stream hierarchy that shows Release 1.0 as a parent to Release 1.1

In this example, the Release 1.0 stream is the flow target for the Release 1.1 stream, which was created from Release 1.0. If you double-click the Release 1.1 stream and select to compare the stream with the flow target, you can compare the contents of Release 1.0 with the contents of Release 1.1.

For more information about configuration management, see the video Configuration Management Overview for CLM v6 releases.