Building and maintaining baselines

About this task

These topics describe how to create baselines that select completed activities and how to create build records.

Once a baseline is available, a build is conducted. From the Build record, you can create a reference to the Baseline record. This links the baseline and the build result. For builds that have passed, a test team can review the baseline record and set of completed activities. Each activity includes a link back to the Primary task which may also include testing activities. With this new visibility into the build contents, Testers can focus their test efforts.

A baseline should be marked Obsolete if it was rejected and did not build, or if it is no longer needed.

The Baseline record can be used to map to UCM baselines. When a baseline is created in UCM, comparing differences between the set of activities from the previous baseline identifies which activities are new. This list of activities can be populated in the Baseline record. For non-UCM users, HCL Compass queries can be used to identify the list of activities, and they can be manually added to the baseline record.

Using an ALM work process with the UCM model provides support for component-based development, and enhances the flow of information concerning what fixes are available, what builds to download, and where the updates are available. Additional enhancements could enable users in any location to detect when a Fix in a Build becomes available, regardless of where it was fixed. To make this work, build information could be associated to a Product Release or Project, so that users know when a Request has been fixed in a later release of the product (that is, later than the version in which the problem was found). Moreover, given a Project name or ID, users could see if an updated version is available and, if so, where it can be installed from.