Life Cycle of Base Line/ Base line strategies in UCM ClearCase

Question

Hello,

We have come up with a stream strategy which has a main integration stream and several other streams for the other environments. A brief idea as shown below.

Integration Stream
-- Production
-- Development
---- Stream for release 1.0
---- Stream fix release 1.0

We intend to use the child streams for development and deliver it to the Development stream and choose the activities and create a baseline and promote them to the integration stream.

I read couple of highly informative posts on this forum and I have few doubts to begin with. I am new to the UCM environment and finding it tough to get the broader picture of the usage.

1. Should the baselines be created on the development branch or the integration branch.
2. How does the baseline goes through the life cycle? Does the baseline we create, after testing, release etc only change in promotion levels?

It would be very helpful if anyone could describe this process.

Thanks in advance.

regards

Answer 1

1/ Should the baselines be created on the development branch or the integration branch.

You can create a baseline on any stream you want. They are just labels on the writable components.
Intermediate baselines can later be "obsoleted" (made locked and invisible) if you need to clean them up.

Your Development stream should be renamed into "Consolidation", because this is where you will consolidate what will actually go to Production (and delivered on "Integration Stream": your "Production" Stream is not needed here).

Since the fixes will begin from an "official" (i.e. "in production") label, I would recommend moving the stream "Stream fix release x.y" below the Integration Stream

Note: you need to be aware that a "deliver activities" creates a timeline linking all the activities from the source stream. That means you can deliver a partial set of activities from stream A to stream B, but you won't be able to deliver from stream A to stream C (unless you deliver all activities).
In short, baselining and delivering all activities is always simpler.

2/ How does the baseline goes through the life cycle

First, the status "TESTED", "VALIDATED", ... is just a meta-attribute you can set to whatever value you want, without any relation with the stream where the baseline has been set.

The life-cycle is then determined by:

• the workflow of merges allowing you to isolate different development effort from one branch (build from the stream) to another.
• the status (meta-data) you associate with your baseline.