Rational Suite Tutorial: Managing Change to Project Artifacts

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Managing Change to Project Artifacts

<< The Rational Unified Process provides customizable guidelines | Typical UCM Workflow >>

Managing Change
to Project Artifacts

In this chapter, you learn about the Rational approach to managing change during
software development using Rational ClearCase LT and Unified Change
Management (UCM). When used together, ClearCase LT and UCM help you
successfully manage changing project artifacts from requirements to release, through
multiple iterations.

Audience

This chapter applies to all team members.

What Is Unified Change Management?

Rational Software offers Unified Change Management (UCM) as the best approach for
managing change during software system development from requirements to release.
UCM focuses on these guiding concepts:

A UCM activity represents the work required to complete a development task.
UCM activities can be derived from a variety of sources, including a defect or an
enhancement request.

An artifact is an item that is produced, modified, or used in the software
development lifecycle as the result of performing an activity. In the Rational
Unified Process (RUP), the artifacts produced in one activity are often used as
input into other activities. Conceptually, artifacts can be requirements, visual
models, test cases, source code, documentation, or project plans. Artifacts are items
that are critical to the success of your project and should be placed under
configuration management, or version control. Usually, an artifact is represented by a
file or a set of files.

The key strength of UCM is that it unifies the activities used to plan and track
software development progress with the artifacts used to create, design, and build
software applications. Figure 12 shows a typical way to manage change using UCM.