Baselines are snapshots of views
of certain elements. The elements in baseline views are read-only
and cannot be edited. You can compare baselines to analyze the differences
between elements.
For example, when changes are made or
when new requirements are added, you might create a baseline and then
compare it to the original baseline. The name of the active baseline
is displayed in parentheses after the title of a view.
For example, you might create a baseline of a requirements specification
before formal change management. When the release is delivered, you
can compare the final specification with the baseline. Some baseline
activities require many resources. Because
Rational® Focal Point™ is
a server application, all current users share computational resources.
Note: - Baselines are not included when you import a workspace.
- Workflows are not displayed in baselines of views.
If several baseline-related operations are in progress,
the load on the server increases. All users that use the same server
are affected, and the server might need to be restarted. To avoid
server load problems, consider the following guidelines when you create
baselines:
- Create baselines on views that contain less than a couple hundred
elements and that use only a few attributes, such as ID, title, text,
and version.
- Create baselines when few users are using the server.
- While you work with baselines, wait until any baseline operations
are finished before you start another action. Creating baselines can
be time consuming.
- Do not use the baseline feature to save changes several times
a day.
- In views that you plan to create baselines of, avoid using link
attributes. To maintain system performance, display baselines that
have few links. To display links in baselines, the element that is
linked from the history values of its attributes is created. This
operation takes some time and can affect server performance. For example,
if a table contains 100 elements and each element has an average of
10 links, 1000 elements are created to display the links. When you
use traceability matrices, more elements must be created. Therefore,
avoid activating baselines with link-intensive display methods, such
as table views, attribute statistics, Gantt charts, relational graphs,
and traceability matrices.
- Do not create baselines on views that contain entire modules.
- Comparing baselines can be time consuming. The larger the baseline,
the longer users might have to wait.
Note: When you compare baselines,
you cannot interrupt that operation before it finishes. If you try
to run two or more comparisons simultaneously, you can see the result
of only the last comparison. This rule applies to all operations,
but is significant for baseline comparisons.