Considerations for enabling configuration management

Before you enable configuration management capabilities for a project area, you should understand how this affects it and its links to artifacts in other project areas. After you enable these capabilities, you cannot disable them.

Read a guidance article for links to videos, considerations, and other resources to help you decide if using configuration management tools is right for your team.

Important:
Before your team can use configuration management capabilities, read this topic and the following article about considerations before enabling configuration management. After you read the article, you can obtain an activation key:

Starting in version 6.0.1, only integrations with the following products support versioned artifacts: IBM Rational® DOORS® Next Generation, IBM Rational Quality Manager, IBM Rational Rhapsody® Design Manager, and IBM Rational Team Concert®. External integrations to Rational Team Concert work items continue to work as expected, because work items are not versioned.

After you understand the behaviors and limitations that are associated with enabling configuration management, and you have an activation key, you can activate configuration management for the Requirements Management (RM) and Quality Management (QM) applications. Then, you can enable the configuration management capabilities in RM and QM project areas. There is no way to reverse the action after you enable a project area. Back up existing repositories before you enable configuration management capabilities. If you restore from a backup, you will lose any changes that were made in all project areas managed by that server.

See the following sections for application or product-specific considerations.

All CLM applications

If you plan to use CLM products in global configurations with other products, the considerations in this topic apply. If you use these products stand-alone (without linking to other applications), the information on this page does not apply.
  • If you need to keep some applications at a version earlier than 6.0, defer enabling configuration management until they all can be upgraded.
  • All the CLM applications should use the same version.
  • For linked RM or QM project areas, if you cannot enable configuration management for all of them, do not enable any of them: Projects that are enabled for configurations cannot be associated with those that are not. For example, if your RM project links to a QM project, or even to another RM project, you cannot enable one and not the other. Links between the projects become uneditable, and links to any artifacts in the enabled project will only resolve to the default configuration. This behavior does not apply if you link from RM or QM projects to either Rational Rhapsody Design Manager or Rational Team Concert. You must make the decision holistically for related project areas. Project areas that are not associated are not affected, and do not have to be enabled.
    Note: In Rational Team Concert and Rational Rhapsody Design Manager (DM), no additional steps are required to activate configuration management.

    Ensure that you have considered all project relationships, because there could be cascading links (for example, RM Project A links to RM Project B, which links to QM Project C).

  • Back links are removed and links across project areas are managed by the Link Index Provider. In projects that are not enabled for configurations, links across project areas are managed by each application storing a copy of the link to the other's artifact, which is sometimes referred to as back linking. When you enable configuration management, only one application stores a link to the other's artifact, and that link goes only in one direction. Most links are managed by the Link Index Provider. If RM or QM artifacts have links to artifacts in other applications, and then you enable configuration management, to see the links across project areas you must set the current configuration to a global configuration that contains the corresponding local configurations. For more information, see Links across project areas after enabling configuration management.
  • Links to tools outside of CLM are inconsistent until those integrations are updated to be compatible with configuration-enabled projects. This includes IBM tools, tools from other vendors, and custom OSLC integrations, such as those created by using the SDK from the Eclipse Lyo project.

RM (Rational DOORS Next Generation)

The following considerations apply to configuration-enabled projects:
  • You can migrate baselines from earlier versions of Rational DOORS Next Generation. Starting in version 6.0, if you start your project without configuration management enabled but enable it later, you can use the baselines that you created.
  • Projects stop their data feeds to the data warehouse, and their data is archived there. All configuration-specific data is stored in the lifecycle index and is accessed by using the Lifecycle Query Engine (LQE) application. See the Reporting section for details.
  • You can create, display, and delete these link types from Rational Rhapsody Design Manager project areas: Derives Architecture Element, Refined by Architecture Element, Traced by Architecture Element, and Satisfied by Architecture Element.
  • There are two ways to use change sets:
    • Simple scenario, using automatic change sets: Rational DOORS Next Generation provides automatic change sets that are created by the system when a change to an artifact or link is saved. You do not have to manually create and name a change set before making changes. You can make changes to links across applications and to RM artifacts, because when you edit a link, you are not in a change set. The system creates and delivers the change set in one atomic action. You can deliver a potentially large set of these changes to another stream, but this is a complex operation in version 6 releases.
    • Complex reuse scenario, using named change sets: You can create explicit, named change sets to more easily group related changes and deliver changes across streams. For some organizations, this practice is required as part of the development process. If your organization is using global configurations, when you create a change set, it is automatically added to your personal stream. You can then edit links to artifacts in other RM, QM, or Rational Rhapsody Design Manager repositories.
      Conflicting change sets will need to be resolved with manual edits. This includes any two change sets that change a module structure (add, remove, or reorder the artifacts in a module). The following actions minimize conflicts:
      • Use many small change sets and deliver them quickly.
      • Make changes in a separate stream, then deliver all changes at once to the original stream.
      • Assign one person to make edits to each module.
    For more information about change sets, see Managing changes to artifacts.
  • Suspect link traceability is replaced with link validity status on links between artifacts. To see this information, enable the option to show link validity status. To understand how link validity helps to achieve consistency across artifacts and links as artifacts change, see this topic.
  • If you click a link stored elsewhere (for example, on a wiki page), this link does not specify the configuration context. Rational DOORS Next Generation shows the artifact at the other end of the link in the default configuration. If the default configuration does not include that artifact, an error is shown indicating that the artifact was not found.
  • You cannot add CLM links within a rich-text artifact because the resolution mechanism uses back links, which are not used after you enable configuration management. If a project already has such links when configuration is enabled, they won't work. To remove the links, use the Links side bar of the artifact or the remove link option in the rich text editor.
  • CLM lifecycle filters and queries, for example, Show test cases that have failed, are not supported. Similarly, you cannot filter QM artifacts by their links to Development Items.
  • The Requirements Tracing widget does not show results.
  • You cannot create a link to a work item from a baseline. You can create this link from a stream. To create a link between a work item and a baseline, create the link from the Change and Configuration Management (CCM) application. For more information about link management and link ownership, see Links across project areas after enabling configuration management.
  • Links between Rational DOORS version 9 objects and objects in the RM or QM applications do not work as expected because Rational DOORS does not support configurations. Instead of linking, use ReqIF to transfer requirements into specific streams or link to work items, which are not versioned.
For more information about these behaviors, see the Rational DOORS Next Generation release notes on Jazz.net.

In project areas that are not enabled for configurations, you should understand the following information about the default configuration:
  • It is the stream that the New project wizard creates by default, and it is the only stream in a project.
  • If the project was migrated from a previous release, the current contents of the project are in this stream.
  • In this release, it is the only configuration where suspect links work properly.
  • The data warehouse contains information only from the default configuration.
  • The default configuration is used in all cases to resolve an incoming link that does not contain configuration information, such as links from a QM project area that is not configuration-enabled, or Hewlett-Packard Quality Center Synchronizer.

QM (Rational Quality Manager)

The following considerations apply to configuration-enabled projects:
  • Use TRS v2.0 as a data source to create the linked lifecycle data index.
  • Projects stop their data feeds to the data warehouse, and their data is archived there. All configuration-specific data is stored in the lifecycle index and is accessed by using the Lifecycle Query Engine (LQE) application. See the Reporting section for details.
  • Fewer dashboard widgets are supported, and Rational Quality Manager dashboard gadgets based on BIRT are not available. To work around this problem, you can create custom widgets with Report Builder or create custom HTML widgets with links to RELM views. Update settings of your dashboard widgets that need to refer to specific configurations.
  • Filtering on development item and development plan links is not supported.
  • The snapshot capability is disabled. You can read previous snapshots but you cannot add them to global configurations or create new snapshots. Use baselines instead.
  • If your QM project requires Rational Quality Manager mobile application for offline test execution, do not enable configuration management for that project area.
  • You cannot create a link to a work item from a baseline. You can create this link from a stream. To create a link between a work item and a baseline, create the link from the Change and Configuration Management (CCM) application.

DM (Rational Rhapsody Design Manager)

  • Change sets that are created in the DM rich client are not automatically added to personal streams. You must add them manually in the GCM application.

CCM (Rational Team Concert)

  • To navigate links to versioned artifacts, you must use the web client, the Rational Team Concert™ client for Microsoft Visual Studio IDE, or the 6.0 (or greater) version of the Rational Team Concert client for Eclipse IDE.
  • To create links to versioned artifacts, you must use the web client, the 6.0 (or greater) version of the Rational Team Concert client for Eclipse IDE, or the 6.0 (or later) version of the Rational Team Concert client for Microsoft Visual Studio IDE.
  • In general, linking Rational Team Concert plans to versioned artifacts is not supported. It is possible to create a link from a versioned artifact to a plan; however, when you navigate the link from within the plan, Rational Team Concert uses the default configuration for the target project area. The default configuration might not be the same configuration from which the link to the plan was created.
  • In a work item that has links to versioned artifacts, if you change the value of the release (deliverable attribute type) field, the links are not updated until you save the work item.
  • Links to versioned artifacts are not supported in the following views:
    • History tab of the work item editor
    • My Activities / My Subscriptions tab in the Quick Planner
    • Dashboard viewlets that show change events
    • Feeds (Rational Team Concert client for Eclipse IDE and Rational Team Concert client for Microsoft Visual Studio IDE)
    • Links tab of a plan
  • You can link work items to versioned artifacts only if the configurations that contain those versioned artifacts belong to global configurations.
  • To specify the mapping of OSLC link types to attributes, and to associate releases with global configurations, you must use the web client.
  • While working in Rational Quality Manager or Rational DOORS Next Generation, you cannot create a link from a baseline to a work item. The workaround is to create the link from within the work item.
  • In the Rational Team Concert client for Eclipse IDE, you can perform a bulk edit of work items to change the target link of versioned artifacts. If the selected work items belong to different releases and have different associated global configurations, Rational Team Concert uses the target artifact versions that belong to the global configuration associated with the first work item in the selected collection.
  • In the web client plan editor, you can perform a bulk edit of work items to change the target link of versioned artifacts. If the selected work items belong to different releases and have different associated global configurations, Rational Team Concert uses the target artifact versions that belong to the global configuration associated with the work item from which the context menu was activated.
  • The Rational solution for CLM includes a set of predefined lifecycle work item queries, which retrieve work items based on their links to artifacts in other applications, such as Requirements Management (RM) and Quality Management (QM). See Using lifecycle queries for the complete list of these queries. For work items that are linked to versioned RM and QM artifacts that do not belong to default configurations, the lifecycle query results might not be accurate.
  • Data warehouse reporting is not supported for links to versioned artifacts.

For more information about configuring your project so that you can link work items to specific versions of artifacts in other applications such as QM and RM, see Enabling linking of work items to versioned artifacts.

Global Configuration Management (GCM) application

In the following points, a GC provider is the GCM application that your deployment uses.

Reporting

Consider these limitations when reporting on data in configurations. For details and other considerations, see Reporting considerations when enabling configuration management.
  • Enabling configuration management in RM and QM project areas stops their feeds to the CLM data warehouse and archives their data there. Rational Team Concert does populate the data warehouse, but that data does not include configuration-related information.
  • All configuration-specific data is stored in the lifecycle index and is accessed by using the Lifecycle Query Engine (LQE) application. The Jazz Reporting Service Report Builder and IBM Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager can report from the lifecycle index by using an LQE with Configurations data source.
  • Link types and attributes for Rational DOORS Next Generation are duplicated. In the Traceability links section, hover over the question mark to identify the project the attribute is from. You must set a condition for each attribute with the same name; then, group them and add an OR relationship between them. To show them in one column when you run the report, in the Format section, give them the same column name.
  • For configuration-enabled projects, reporting on metrics or historical trends is not supported at this time.
  • If two artifacts are connected by using any of the link types that are listed here, you can create a traceability report (starting with either artifact A or artifact B) with correct results. However, if A and B are connected by any other type of Rational DOORS Next Generation link, you can report only in the forward direction. These link types work:
    • http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/rdm/types/ArtifactTermReferenceLink
    • http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/rdm/types/Decomposition
    • http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/rdm/types/Embedding
    • http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/rdm/types/Extraction
    • http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/rdm/types/Link
    • http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/rdm/types/SynonymLink
    • http://purl.org/dc/terms/references
    • oslc_rm:affectedBy
    • oslc_rm:implementedBy
    • oslc_rm:trackedBy
    • oslc_rm:validatedBy
    • oslc_rm:elaborates
    • oslc_rm:elaboratedBy
    • oslc_rm:specifies
    • oslc_rm:specifiedBy
    Note: oslc_rm is from the http://open-services.net/ns/rm# namespace.

    There is no workaround. To get the results of all the relationships and artifacts that are attached by the relationship, you must build two traceability reports: for example, in one report, the traceability links start with artifact A; in the other report, they start with artifact B. Then, run both reports, and manually compare the results.

    To learn more about link ownership, see the "Linking after enabling configurations" section in Links across project areas after enabling configuration management.

Related information:
Enabling configurations in CLM version 6 releases
Reporting considerations when enabling configuration management
Additional reporting tips in version 6 (all releases)

video icon Watch videos

CLM playlist
Jazz.net channel
User Education channel

learn icon Learn more

CLM learning circle
Agile learning circle
Learning circles

ask icon Ask questions

Jazz.net forum
developerWorks forums

support icon Get support

Support Portal
Deployment wiki
Support blog