Requirement Baselining

Basics

Baseline functionality has been part of codeBeamer since release 5.5. This article focuses on tracker baselines; you can check this page to learn more about the idea behind baselines and how it is implemented in codeBeamer.

Creating Tracker Baselines

Traditional baselines created on the Baselines page contain a snapshot of the whole project; including -among other things- the state of the trackers. On the other hand tracker baselines only hold the state of the trackers and nothing else. You can imagine a tracker baseline as a subset of a normal baseline. Creating these type of baselines happen on each tracker's page. Let's see for example a Requirements tracker in Document View mode:

Clicking on the New Baseline menu option opens the familiar dialog.

A notifications shows up after the new baseline has been created.

We have just created a tracker baseline! Let's move forward and see what can we do with it.

Comparing Tracker Baselines

Activating and comparing tracker baselines is pretty similar to normal baselines, and of course, both operation can be initiated on the Baselines tab.

Tracker baselines have an additional descriptor row to make it easier to find them. In our case it is "Source Tracker: Requirements".

Comparing these types of baseline is possible.

Of course the results can be viewed in a similar interface:

Although tracker and other types of baselines can be compared, the results might contain objects, which are not part of the tracker baseline, so the differences might be misleading.

Viewing Tracker Baselines

Clicking on the name of a tracker baseline on Baselines tab activates the selected baseline. An information bar appears at the top of the page.

It not only shows the current baseline, but also has action links. The first link opens a Baseline browser and lets you to change the active baseline easily.

You can also view differences in the usual way by clicking on Compare Selected Baselines button.

Just as normal baselines, tracker baselines also show up on the Baselines tab of a requirement.

Summary

The article described the use of tracker baselines for requirement baselining. This new tool makes it easier to create baselines focusing just on the requirements and provides an option to create different type of baselines to suit different needs.