A conflict is a potential issue with your configuration. Conflict detection is a way to check that your project contains the configuration you requested. Conflict detection identifies when only part of a change is included in your configuration. It helps ensure that if you include a particular change (as defined by a task), it includes all of the change.
For example, after you update your project, then perform a show conflicts operation, you will receive a conflict warning if you have an object that is associated with multiple tasks. If your team often rewrites a program to fix multiple problems in that program, then an object that is associated with multiple tasks will not be a problem to your organization. You can turn off such conflict notifications so that you are informed of only those that you will want to resolve.
Use conflict detection to perform an operation that will tell you if your configuration is missing part of a change or includes an unexpected change.
The next several sections will show you how to find some of these conflicts, what causes these potential issues, how to resolve them, if necessary, and how to tell Rational Synergy what type of conflicts you want to be notified about.
A conflict arises when there is a difference between the update properties for the project and the project members. The relationships Rational Synergy uses to detect conflicts include:
For example, Rational Synergy detects a conflict when an object is a member of your project, but is not associated with any tasks in the update properties for the project. Alternatively, Rational Synergy detects a conflict when an object is associated with a task specified in your update properties for the project, but the object is not in your project (directly or as a predecessor of another object).
Update your projects immediately before showing the conflicts for a project or projects. If the update properties for a project change after you update it or you manually update its members, conflicts will be shown for discrepancies between the update properties for the project and the project members. Therefore, showing conflicts immediately after updating the update properties for the project minimizes the chance of additional conflicts.