What is the Global Configuration Switcher?

The product line engineering capability adds a Configuration Management menu to the practitioner tools in the IBM IoT Continuous Engineering solution. The menu provides commands to select a configuration context and perform actions on the current configuration context. is a baseline or stream that contains a set of versioned artifacts. A global configuration represents a physical or logical piece of a product offering. It gathers configurations for itself and other contributing applications in IoT Continuous Engineering solutions.

The Configuration Management menu allows users to choose a Project Area configuration of the project area currently opened in the application. The menu also allows users to choose a Global Configuration context. Once a configuration has been chosen, the user may use the Configuration Management menu to create new streams or baselines. Users may also deliver changes from or into the currently selected baseline.

PLE Hills

The hill for PLE states that “Hill 1: Teams enjoy configuration management in and across their ALM tools” and that “With minimal impact to current usage, team members can select a configuration related to their plan and be confident that they are using the right artifacts and links.”

system engineer

The hill for PLE states that “Hill 1: Teams enjoy configuration management in and across their ALM tools” and that “With minimal impact to current usage, team members can select a configuration related to their plan and be confident that they are using the right artifacts and links.”

User research identifies the need to scope the capabilities on the Configuration Management menu to the right level of user maturity

  • System Engineers and Testers may be assigned work in a configuration. Such a user just wants to browse from the work item into the configuration selected for the work. The user experience for switching into a configuration should now require any action by the user.
  • Users with no permissions for Configuration Management should not see such actions on the Configuration Management menu
  • System Engineers with Configuration Management permissions should be presented with menu commands to choose a configuration context.
  • System Engineers with Configuration Management permissions should be presented links to browse into the definition of a global configuration in the Configuration Management Application

User Experience Low Fidelity Design – Configuration Management menu

Early playback of Configuration Management menu

User Experience High Fidelity Prototypes

Running code prototypes of Configuration Management Application

User Experience – IBM IoT Continuous Engineering 6.0 GA

Released version of Configuration Management Application