SCM CM and Work Item Integration

This page discusses the integration of Change Management and SCM, from change requests through the objects variously known as work items, activities, tasks, etc., to change sets in SCM, and from the change set to the version controlled resources associated with that change set. Together with other efforts not in the SCM scope, such as Requirements Management and Quality Management, these services provide traceability between requirements, change requests, code, and test, and are an essential part of the Collaborative ALM Scenarios.

NickCrossley: Of course, this entire scenario assumes that the SCM system has the concept of change sets. Are we working with any systems that do not have that concept, but have some other way of providing the traceability we want?

The Change Management services already define a way to get from change requests to change sets, so the SCM scope covers just the change set and the version controlled resources. NickCrossley: it is not clear that CM 2.0 includes a service to find the change requests associated with a given change set; I think such a service is required for two-way traceability.

SCM services shall include:

• Querying for change sets with given properties
  NickCrossley Note that querying directly for version controlled objects does not appear to be required for this scenario.
• Finding the properties of a given change set
• Finding the version controlled resources associated with a change set, and their properties
• Finding the change sets associated with a given version controlled resource
• Submitting, committing, or completing a change set
  NickCrossley Some SCM systems may not have the concept of a change set that has not yet been submitted or completed, in that the change set itself might be created by the act of submitting/committing/checking in a number of modified files.
• Displaying the content changes made with a given change set - that is, comparing the file versions associated with a change set vs. their immediate predecessors
  NickCrossley See the comments about file comparison options in the ScmBuildIntegrationStory.
• Show the change sets that were added and/or removed between two configurations; the configurations might be identified by some form of baseline, tag or label as applied during the ScmBuildIntegrationStory
  NickCrossley This report allows traceability back to the change requests that were included in a build (defects fixed), and is therefore important for integration with testing.