Working with Baselines
Baselines preserve data for a collection of items at a point in time, such as a project milestone. Information in a baseline cannot be modified, so they provide a reliable way to see historical information about your products and releases. Use baselines to understand what changed between two milestones, such as releases, iterations, sprints, reviews or drafts. Whether you need to survive an audit or quickly review what changed, baselines can save time, provide insight, and make collaboration easier.
Before your team starts using baselines, review best practices for setting up your project and managing baselines.
Note: To work with baselines, an administrator or other high-level user must add you to a security group with permissions to work with baselines. Security groups are managed in the Helix ALM desktop client. See Baseline security commands in the desktop client help for information.
You can perform the following actions when working with baselines.
Add baselines
To add a baseline, you select the source items to include, which can be any Helix ALM item type — requirements, requirement documents (including all requirements in the documents), test cases, test runs, issues, and folders (including all items and subfolders in the folders). Capture full traceability information by automatically including items related or linked to the source items. See Adding baselines.
When a new milestone occurs and it is time to add another baseline, you can duplicate an existing baseline to add the new one with the same collection of items. See Duplicating baselines.
Attach files to baselines
After you add a baseline, you can attach files to it to save for future reference. For example, you may want to attach a PDF file of a report or exported Microsoft Word document related to a baseline. See Attaching files to baselines.
View differences between two baselines
You can compare two baselines to see what changed. You can see a side-by-side list of all items included in each baseline and easily identify added, removed, changed, and unchanged items. See Viewing differences between baselines.
You can also view differences for items to see detailed changes made between the baselines, such as changes to fields, workflow, links, folders, and more depending on the item type. See Viewing differences between items in baselines
View differences between a current item and the item in a baseline
When you are working with an item, click the Baselines tab to see baselines the item is in. You can compare the current item to revisions captured in baselines to see how the item changed. See Working with baselines from items.
Run baseline differences reports
When you are viewing differences between two baselines, you can run reports in HTML or PDF format that include information about items that changed. Reports can contain a list of differences between both baselines, a grouped list by item type, or summary of changes. See Running baseline differences reports.
Note: Administrators can configure compliance options for baselines. See Configuring baseline compliance settings.
About baselines vs. requirement document snapshots
Baselines and requirement document snapshots may seem similar, but have significant differences to consider when using them.
- Baselines can contain all item types. Snapshots only include requirements in the document and do not show traceability between different item types that are related.
- Baselines include detailed information about all items included in them. Snapshots contain more high-level detail than baselines and may not provide all of the information you need at a point in time.
- Snapshots can be automatically added using automation rules. Baselines must be added manually.
- Baselines can become large if they include a lot of items, which requires more space in the Helix ALM database. We recommend only adding snapshots at important milestones in the lifecycle of a project. Snapshots require less space and designed to capture the state of a document more frequently than just at major milestones.
