An important part of effective configuration management is a clear and well understood release management policy. This helps plan when changes are to be applied to the production system. It should cater for both the medium to long-term enhancements as well as short term fixes that may be required.
GuardIEn helps projects to define and plan release implementations by providing facilities to document the releases and their content. Multiple system releases can be defined as either independent releases, or linked as a hierarchy of releases which facilitates the tracking of changes between releases.
GuardIEn allows the parallel development of system releases. This enables the team to work on more than one release at the same time. The diagram below illustrates an example model architecture for parallel development.
One of the problems with parallel development is ensuring that any changes or fixes that are applied to a release are also applied to the subsequent release. This is illustrated in the diagram above by the blue double headed arrow linking the development models for releases 1 and 2.
GuardIEn contains special facilities for tracking changes in one release and detecting whether they can be safely migrated to the next release or not. It uses a concept called 'baselining' to detect whether the object has been changed in the subsequent release and thus whether it can be migrated or whether the change has to be manually applied to the next release to avoid losing any changes made in that release.