Managing change in a serial development environment

In a serial development environment, a team uses one workspace. You can create change sets to group your changes, then share your changes; the process of sharing makes your changes visible in the workspace. If you do not create a change set, each time that you save your changes to a resource, your changes are visible to the team members with whom you share the workspace.

Before you begin

You should be familiar with project areas, configuration spaces, snapshots, workspaces, and change sets, which are described in Management of shared resources.

Procedure

The workflow for managing change in a serial collaborative development environment includes the following high-level steps:

  1. Create and configure a project area in the lifecycle management product; then add members to the project area.

    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.

  2. Associate the project area in the lifecycle management product with a Configuration Management application configuration space. Complete this step for each project area that you create in step 1.

    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.

  3. Add resources to the project area. If your project uses resources that are in different project areas, you must create dependency relationships with these resources.
  4. Optional: Create a snapshot of the project.

    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.

  5. Optional: 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.

  6. Optional: Use change sets to manage your changes:

    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.

    1. Create a change set to group your changes to resources.
    2. Switch the context to the change set that you created.

      From this point on, the resources that you change are added to this change set.

  7. Create, edit, or delete resources as required by the project.
  8. If you created one or more change sets to group your changes, mark your change set or sets as complete.
  9. Optional: If the lifecycle management product that you use supports it, create a review for team members to review your changes.

    The team members that you specify as the reviewers receive a notification on their project dashboard.

  10. If you created one or more change sets to group your changes, share your changes.

    After you share your changes, they are visible in the workspace.


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