Overview of Global Configuration Management

Global Configuration Management (GCM) is an application that assembles configurations for itself and other contributing applications so teams can gain an overall view of the physical and logical parts of their product offering.

A configuration is a baseline or stream that contains a set of versioned artifacts. A global configuration represents a physical or logical piece of a product offering. It gathers configurations for itself and other contributing Rational® solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) applications.

Global Configuration Management integrates with the following CLM applications.

The Requirements Management application (RM) delivers requirements definition and requirements management capabilities.
The Quality Management (QM) application delivers testing and test management capabilities.
The Design Management (DM) application delivers design management capabilities.
The software configuration management part of the Rational Team Concert™ application delivers work item capabilities.

Note: The RM and QM applications must be enabled for configuration management before they can participate in global configurations.

When teams work in different silos, costly errors occur that are not found until late in the development cycle. Use global configurations to assemble and integrate streams and baselines contributed across the different CLM applications to define physical or logical products. Global configurations

gather contributions from GCM and CLM applications, such as requirements, designs, tests, and global configurations, to a larger working context.
provide a context for resolving links between versioned artifacts within and across CLM applications.
plan and manage the reuse of configurations in the many versions or variants of your physical or logical product line.
work in parallel on multiple development streams.
re-create a development environment from the past, for example, to branch and create a stream for a product fix.

Users of the contributing CLM applications can set a global configuration context in their familiar tools, and the global configuration provides the context across the applications, ensuring that artifact versions resolve to the appropriate stream or baseline in each application.

Additionally, organizations face pressure to release different versions and variations of products faster and to meet quality standards during the development process. When Engineering teams are able to work on multiple development streams or practice reuse across a vast product offering, project leads and their teams gain a better understanding of the configurations they need to create and reuse, so they can make more effective and timely engineering decisions, while meeting quality goals.

Configuration leads can perform the following tasks that are related to global configurations. (The tasks might be performed by other team members, such as project managers, development leads, or team leads.)

Set up global configurations to establish a work context across applications for a product offering.
Add and manage configurations for GCM and contributing CLM applications to a stream.
Create a global baseline to capture a milestone.
Create a variant of a configuration by branching.
Compare configurations.
Run a report to detect multiple configurations of a component.
Find where a stream or baseline is used in other configurations.
View local configurations in a global configuration tree view to see the configurations as a single, logical unit, to move, reorder, remove, or reuse configurations.

Users can perform the following tasks that are related to global configurations.

In a CLM application, set their working context to a global configuration to create or see links to artifacts in other CLM applications.
View local configurations in a global configuration tree view to see configurations across applications as a single, logical unit.

Users might be able to perform other tasks that are related to their local configurations in their CLM application, depending on permissions. For example, users might have permission to create a variant of a configuration, run compare and find use reports, and add configurations to a global configuration.

To learn more about getting started with global configurations, see Using global configurations.

To learn about the workflow, see Workflow for global configurations.

To learn about configuration management, see the guidance article for links to videos, considerations, and other resources to help you decide if using configuration management tools is right for your team.

Integration partners

Global Configuration Management is an application that integrates with and assembles configurations that contain artifact versions that were created and managed in Rational DOORS Next Generation, Rational Design Management, Rational Quality Manager, and Rational Team Concert.

Rational Jazz integration services

The GCM application is built on the Jazz™ integration platform. The software architecture for the GCM application is based on an Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) specification. OSLC uses a common set of resources, formats, and Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural services to enable data sharing between CLM applications. An Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) OSLC Configuration Management specification describes how to identify and reference versioned artifacts. Applications must support the specification to participate in a global configuration and understand versioned artifacts. The CLM applications support the OASIS OSLC Configuration Management specification.

OSLC provides an open, scalable set of specifications for integrating tools in heterogeneous development environments. The data sharing supports linking that is based on HTTP protocol, identification of resources by URIs, and information retrieval that uses industry standard media types. The collaboration server and data sharing are secured by using the standard HTTP authentication mechanisms and OAuth authorization protocol.

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