When requirements analist have the requirements ready, they want to put a baseline on it, so that they can handover this baseline to software architects and developers. In the meantime, the analists continue working on the requirements for the next release.
Ah, good ole waterfall 8-)
So the big question is:
Is there a possibility to select a baseline (for view only) in such a way that other people in the same project can continue working normally in the latest version?
The problem is that everybody is working on HEAD at the same time which is difficult if the product evolves thus a lot of overlapping occurs. Lots of processes only consider throw-away projects where this scenario does not occur and omit that obvious scenario.
What eg. when requirements changes occur during lifetime? Or SW architecture requires changes while HEAD has alreay evolved? What if you have to change an old baseline later on?
We have the same problem here- the only solution I ever found is to work with a central repository and make use of the baseline import/export functionality.
When a certain milestone is reached the baseline can be exported, loaded into the current project model (a seperate repository) and changes are inspected without overwriting anything.
You can make changes yourself (eg. as a sw architect) to that model and afterwards create a baseline which can then be loaded into the HEAD branch. A developer loads your baseline into project branch, inspects the changes, changes things, creates the baseline, etc.
This procedure will even make it possible to change milestones later on- load the baseline into a seperate repository, change it, create a new baseline and merge it back into HEAD.
I have to admit we do not work like this (yet). But this is the scenario I have played with and it looks like it will work.
HTH.
Oliver
