Setting Baselines In A Multi Product Database

Hi

I am trying to decide how to separately baseline each product in a multi product database. I would be interested to know how other organisations deal with this situation.

The background is that we are developing a common database in DOORS that will hold the requirements for different products.These products will have their own product specific customer requirements in separate modules but below that there will be a common set of requirements available to all products that will contain :

  • product specific requirements
  • common requirements
  • variant requirements.

The variant requirements will be derived from common requirements so some requirements modules in the database will contain common requirements and variant requirements. A variant requirement is a different object from the common requirement object that it is derived from but with the requirement text worded differently - essentially the same requirement as the common requirement but for product reasons a slightly different wording is required. The variant requirement is 'related' to the common requirement in that they both share the same master ID but have different version numbers. A products multi attribute will be used to indicate which products a requirements applies to.

We will need to set a different baseline for each product. Ideally we would like to set a baseline for a product consisting of the product specific requirements and a selection of common requirements and the variant requirements for that product from lots of requirements modules. The problem is that setting a baseline in a module, baselines all the requirements and not just the ones that we want baselined. It doesn’t feel right having irrelevant requirements in a product baseline - but perhaps that is the price to be paid for taking a product-based approach.

So our problem is how we should set baselines for different products ensuring that each baseline contains the appropriate selection of requirements from our modules. Does anyone have a solution to this problem ?
zenyk - Tue May 12 05:54:32 EDT 2009

Re: Setting Baselines In A Multi Product Database
SystemAdmin - Tue May 12 19:32:42 EDT 2009

Hi,

Your need to be able to manage common requirements, multiple concurrent releases, product variants etc, comes up in this forum every now and again. To be able to manage these, DOORS needs to support the branch, merge and rebase model commonly found in Configuration Management tools. I can direct you to some interesting discussions and ideas in the old Telelogic DOORS forum which cover this topic. See URLs below.

Requirements Changes by Release: https://forum.telelogic.com/customer/doors/messageview.cfm?catid=31&threadid=5065

Can DOORS baseline, branch, merge? https://forum.telelogic.com/customer/doors/messageview.cfm?catid=31&threadid=8747

Any white paper for using DOORS in incremental development project https://forum.telelogic.com/customer/doors/messageview.cfm?catid=58&threadid=4487


Paul Miller

Re: Setting Baselines In A Multi Product Database
SystemAdmin - Mon May 25 12:56:15 EDT 2009

Hi,

We had a similar situation in dealing with the creation of different devices from requirements in a common database (let us call it master). We did not classify the requirements as common, variant or specific. We combined all of them under appropriate sections. We created an object attribute in the master module that copies the object identifier for each object.
For each device, the planner will select the requirements available in the master. Once the selection is done, a filtered view of the master is created for the device, which includes the object identifier attribute, and that view is copied as a specific module for the device (called the product module). This product module is baselined. As the review process goes along, the product module is edited by adding/deleting/changing the requirements. After the lock-down stage is reached, this product module is compared with the baseline and master module. Now the planner will decide whether the changes in the product module are to be included in the master module or not - if the requirements are specific for this product, they are not included in the master module. Since we have the master module object identifier attribute available in the final version of the product module(for most of the objects), it will be easier to track the changes.
You may consider whether such a process will work for you.

  • Krishna

Re: Setting Baselines In A Multi Product Database
SystemAdmin - Wed Dec 02 11:43:38 EST 2009

SystemAdmin - Tue May 12 19:32:42 EDT 2009
Hi,

Your need to be able to manage common requirements, multiple concurrent releases, product variants etc, comes up in this forum every now and again. To be able to manage these, DOORS needs to support the branch, merge and rebase model commonly found in Configuration Management tools. I can direct you to some interesting discussions and ideas in the old Telelogic DOORS forum which cover this topic. See URLs below.

Requirements Changes by Release: https://forum.telelogic.com/customer/doors/messageview.cfm?catid=31&threadid=5065

Can DOORS baseline, branch, merge? https://forum.telelogic.com/customer/doors/messageview.cfm?catid=31&threadid=8747

Any white paper for using DOORS in incremental development project https://forum.telelogic.com/customer/doors/messageview.cfm?catid=58&threadid=4487


Paul Miller

Hi Paul,

Do you have still access to these articles/posts from the old telelogic forums about branching/merging ? We face currently this issue and don't now yet how to solve it. Therefore, I'm very interesetd in idea's and possible solutions.

Best regards
Patrick

Re: Setting Baselines In A Multi Product Database
SystemAdmin - Fri Dec 04 01:23:22 EST 2009

SystemAdmin - Wed Dec 02 11:43:38 EST 2009
Hi Paul,

Do you have still access to these articles/posts from the old telelogic forums about branching/merging ? We face currently this issue and don't now yet how to solve it. Therefore, I'm very interesetd in idea's and possible solutions.

Best regards
Patrick

The old Telelogic forums have been taken off line by IBM but they have made an archive available - click here to go to a thread of discussion about this and look for a response from "Steve-Developer". The links that I gave in my post won't work in the archive so I'm afraid that your going to have to try and search for them within the archive.


Paul Miller