New state in exisiting project

Products

• CA Harvest Software Change Manager - OpenMake Meister

Issue/Introduction

One of our active critical project life cycle which we are using last 10 years, we want to add one more state b/w Merge and System Test. Is there any concern adding additional state into existing life cycle or any impact?

Environment

CA Harvest SCM all versions and platforms

Resolution

Introducing a new state in the middle of the lifecycle of an existing project is complicated and not recommended as a best practice.  This is particularly true if you want the new state to have its own separate data view.  This is because the new data view is only populated with versions that were in the project's baseline when the project was created.  Any packages that have been promoted to later states have not passed through the new state by promotion, so the state's data view doesn't "know" about them yet.  This causes serious problems when trying to promote or demote packages.

If you must add a new state to an existing project it is recommended to have it "share" the data view of either the state just before or the state just after.  This way the new state will be populated with all the versions that have passed through the shared state, eliminating the promotion and demotion problems.

If at all possible, the best solution is to wait to incorporate the new state until you have completed the existing project and are ready to spin off a new project for the next release.  As you create the new project, this is the best time to incorporate the new state.