Use Case: How to work with baselined content to create a new variant

There might be thousands of reasons, why you want to continue working on old versions of your documents like Requirement-, Test- or Product Specifications. You maybe want to create another variant of your software – but not based on your latest version, but maybe on your version 1.0. Now you might be already at version 3.2.

If you would have used Word – then you could hopefully find old copies of the project files of version 1.0. Maybe they were archived somewhere during the release. But with Polarion you’re revisioning every change made in the Project and you can use any version of your documents in the past to build your new project upon.

But if you show yourself a baseline of Polarion e.g. the one of version 1.0, then you can only see the documents and reports, but can’t edit them – of course, as you can’t change the past. Where should the changes be applied to, what happens with the present?

So lets say you want to branch your old documents from Version 1.0 in another project, to create a new variant of your product.

To do this, you can simply go into your document. Here the System Specification. And go to „Branch“.

Here you can select the Revision of the Document, that should be branched. In our case it would be the Baseline for 1.0.

Before branching you can also select the project, where you want to work with these documents.

Click OK – Done.

The same applies to any document. Also to Test Specifications. So if you want to retest an old version for a bugfix, you can branch the old Test Specification and adapt the old tests to the bugfix. Then test it again.

These are just two use cases. Let me know, if you have others 😉