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.

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, manual 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.