Each deliverable is individually versioned in GuardIEn. This enables the tracking of the versions that have been created for a deliverable, the release of the system they are included in, and their progress through the development life-cycle. Versions are automatically created by GuardIEn when changes are uploaded to the encyclopaedia using the integrated Upload Assistant.
The concept of versioning deliverables is key to the effective automation of configuration management, but it also requires the ability to explicitly and uniquely identify individual versions. Whilst CA Gen allows multiple versions to be stored, it does not allow them to be explicitly identified. GuardIEn complements CA Gen by enabling the explicit identification of versions. The data about the versions is stored in the GuardIEn database and linked to the underlying objects in the models.
GuardIEn can be setup to record each change made to an object, when it was changed and which userid applied the change.It can store the action diagram (PAD) statements for each change and produce a comparison between any two versions. This allows statement level tracking of changes to an action diagram without requiring separate models. To view the differences, you can select any two versions and press the Compare button to view the differences. Since GuardIEn stores the data for the minor versions in its own database, it is able to provide statement by statement, property by property tracking of changes. This is not possible if you only rely on the Gen encyclopaedia since a Gen model only contains the latest version of an object.
