You should be familiar with project areas, configuration spaces, snapshots, workspaces, and change sets, which are described in Management of shared resources.
The workflow for managing change in a serial collaborative development environment includes the following high-level steps:
If your collaborative development environment has multiple teams, you might create a project area for each team. By default, a working environment, also called workspace configuration or workspace, is created for each space.
You cannot change this association after it is made. If the configuration space does not exist for your project area, you must create it.
In a serial collaborative development environment, you typically associate multiple project areas in lifecycle management products with the same configuration space. As a result of sharing the configuration space, multiple project areas implicitly share working environments, also called configurations. As a result of this sharing, teams do not have to manually synchronize their working environments.
Although project areas implicitly share configurations, only the resources for a specific project area are shown when team members view configurations.
A snapshot is a read-only view of the project at a specific point in time. By creating a snapshot, you also create a starting point for a new workspace.
Except for the default workspace that is created when you create a project area, all workspaces must be based on a snapshot. You must create a snapshot when you want to create a workspace.
You might create a workspace after you create a snapshot that corresponds to a milestone. A workspace represents a branch of a design or product, or a development project; it contains all the resources that are in the parent snapshot, and separates new work from other working environments.
By default, if you do not create a change set, your changes are visible in the workspace as soon as you save your changes.
By using change sets, you can create logical groupings of changed resources. Change sets make it easier for other team members to review and, depending on the lifecycle management product that you use, approve your changes.
From this point on, the resources that you change are added to this change set.
The team members that you specify as the reviewers receive a notification on their project dashboard.
After you share your changes, they are visible in the workspace.