Baselines

Feedback from SimonWills:

I have read the BaselinesInOslc note, and think that it covers the ground pretty well.

My biggest concerns in this area (as elsewhere) relate to traceability. The Core note does cover this, but I think it’s worth making a couple of explicit points, namely:

a. Baselines should incorporate the state of links between contained resources, not just the state of the resources themselves

b. Links in baselines should be immutable (or, at least, should be no less immutable than contained resources)

c. There should be support for links from contained resources to non-baselined resources (though whether these links should be mutable is debatable)

d. There should be support for links from non-baselined resources to contained resources (these probably will be mutable)

One other suggestion (which is not, I think, covered by the existing note) – what about ‘baseline patterns’ (i.e. what DOORS calls a Baseline Set Description)? This defines a collection of (un-versioned) resources that may be baselined at some future point in time. It would be a resource in its own right, distinct from individual baseline resources. Such patterns can help save much time in scenarios such as re-baselining a common set of resources.