In UCM, your work follows a cycle that complements an iterative software development process. Members of a project team work in a UCM project. A project is the object that contains the configuration information needed to manage a significant development effort, such as a product release. A project contains one main shared work area and typically multiple private work areas. Private work areas allow developers to work on activities in isolation.
The project manager and integrator are responsible for maintaining the shared work area of a project. Work within a project progresses as follows:
- You create a project and identify an initial set of baselines of one or more components. A component is a group of related directory and file elements, which you develop, integrate, and release together. A baseline is a version of one or more components. When you create the project, you also set the policies that govern how developers work on the project.
- Developers join the project by creating their private work areas and populating them with the contents of the project's baselines.
- Developers create activities and work on one activity at a time. Alternatively, you can create activities and assign them to developers. An activity records the set of files that a developer creates or modifies to complete a development task, such as fixing a bug. This set of files associated with an activity is known as a change set.
- When developers complete activities, and build and test their work in their private work areas, they share their work with the project team by performing deliver operations. A deliver operation merges work from the developer's private work area to a parent stream or to the shared work area of the project.
- Periodically, the integrator builds the project executable files in the shared work area, using the delivered work.
- If the project files build successfully, the integrator creates new baselines. In a separate work area, a team of software quality engineers performs more extensive testing of the new baselines.
- Periodically, as the quality and stability of baselines improve, the integrator adjusts the promotion level attribute of baselines to reflect appropriate milestones, such as Built, Tested, or Released. When the new baselines pass a sufficient level of testing, the integrator designates them as the recommended set of baselines.
- Developers perform rebase operations to update their private work areas to include the set of versions represented by the new recommended baselines.
- Developers continue the cycle of working on activities, delivering completed activities, updating their private work areas with new baselines. As project manager, you use Rational® ClearCase® tools to monitor the status of development work throughout the project lifecycle.