Getting started with configuration management

Configuration management capabilities in the Rational® solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) enable multi-stream development, artifact reuse, and linking to artifacts across project areas. For Quality Management (QM) and Requirements Management (RM) applications, a Jazz™ administrator must have an activation key and activate this feature at the application level, and then enable individual 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 CLM 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 CLM applications.

To watch YouTube videos about configuration management, go to the Introduction to configuration management with the IBM® Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management playlist on the IBM Rational User Education channel.

Teams use their configuration management-enabled CLM 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 Design Management (DM) application, there are no steps to activate and enable configuration management. By default, these project areas are compatible with RM and QM project areas that are enabled for configurations, and team members can create cross-application links to artifacts they need.

In the Change and Configuration Management (CCM) application, there are steps that you must complete to be able to link work items to versioned artifacts in RM and QM project areas. See Linking work items to artifacts in Configuration Management-enabled project areas.

Before your team can use these capabilities, these actions are required:
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: In the Change and Configuration Management (CCM) box below, the task "Analyze the impact of a requested change" 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 CLM Click for more about upgrading CLM Click for more about activating configuration management capabilities in CLM applications Click this area to get information about enabling configuration management in project areas Click for more about creating a component to establish a work context Click for more about creating configurations in CLM project areas Click for more about creating the global configuration hierarchy Click for more about associating a global configuration with a release 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 adding your changes to 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 RTC 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

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