How to compare changes on links among RM/RQM/RTC for different release with Global Configuration enabled?
Accepted answer
Hi Jane,
Link behaviour in configuration-enabled projects can be confusing because they are directional and stored on only the artifact considered to be the "source" of the link.
In your scenario, the QM artifact stores the link to the requirement. So although you are making the change in an RM change set, you are actually changing only the QM artifact. The requirement is only checking LDX to discover and display incoming links. So when you deliver your change set that includes only RM-QM links, the deliver wizard can't detect any change to the RM artifacts and complains.
Although you discard the change set, you already created the link in QM, which has no change sets, so it was stored or "committed" immediately. Discarding the change set thus does not delete the link. (One might argue that the RM stream should not "find" the link that was created to the change set - but then you'd just have a dangling link in QM which might be worse.)
If you already had a QM baseline before you created the link, comparing the QM stream AFTER creating the link should show the difference. In my testing, I took a QM-only baseline immediately before creating the change set and the link, and then after discarding the undeliverable change set, I compared by QM stream to the baseline and saw the link change.
When you compare global configurations, the comparison is limited to the contributions themselves; it does not include the individual artifacts. So you would have to identify the QM configurations in your global baseline, open the QM configuration in context of your desired global stream, and then in the QM application, compare to the QM baseline.
You could also generate a document for each GC and do a doc comparison to identify the differences. You can do that manually (use document generation for each GC and MS Word compare capability), or in 604, Rational Publishing Engine provides a more automated way to do that.
Hope that helps. Directional links can be really confusing.
Comments
Hi Kathryn,
Hi Jane,
The reporting isn't in GCM application. Some options:
1) In DNG, generate a Traceability Report for the artifacts (links must be on the base artifacts), one for each configuration context, then use Word compare. In 604, you can generate a document based on a view, which makes things easier especially if you're using modules.
2) In Report Builder, define a traceability report for requirements > tests and run against each configuration. In 603, export results for each to Excel 2013 or 2016 for comparison. In 604, you can export from Report Builder directly to Word and compare.
3) Use Rational Publishing Engine to define and gen documents for each configuration, and compare in Word, as described in this blog post. (You can also export JRS reports to RPE.) In 604, RPE has more automation to do the comparisons; see New & Noteworthy entry for more info.
Hope that helps!
One other answer
Note that for change management of the links, it is important to understand where links are stored (and some of the application GUI's are being enhanced to make this clearer), but you can "find all changed links" in a global configuration without knowing where the links are stored. In particular, perform a GC compare first, and then perform the appropriate domain specific compare on all of the GC contributions that the GC compare has shown as being changed.