Guidelines for working with change tracking

The point at which you need to conform to a change control process will depend upon the project but usually is after a major delivery or milestone, such as when the first external approval status has been reached. It is certainly good to leave this until you have to because enforcing a change control too early in the process would cause friction to change at a time when the key aim is to try to get it right first time.

Create Change Notes regularly with a few changes being made against each Change Note.

If a Change Note is active for a long time and covers many changes made in a model, it becomes more difficult to review the Change Note at a later date.

Note that Change Notes are intended to have a one-to-one correspondence to change requests.

Typically only one user should use an active Change Note. When Change Notes are not shared, it is easy to identify what changes were made against a Change Note and who made those changes.

To make a Change Note active, you require write access permissions to the Package that owns the Change Note.

To ensure that only the required user or users can work with a Change Note, you should ensure that the access permissions of the owning Package are set accordingly. You can create multiple Packages that have different access permissions set, and then create each Change Note in the appropriate Package.

When all the changes relating to a Change Note have been made, close the Change Note so that it is not used by mistake.

If a Change Note is closed and is no longer required in the Model, delete that Change Note to minimize the size of the model.

Before deleting a Change Note, you may want to ensure that it is backed up, for example, through the versioning of a Model.

To delete a Change Note, you must have owner access permissions to the Model.

If a model contains parts that are and are not under change control, use dummy Change Notes to track changes made to the parts of the model that are not under change control.

If you use dummy Change Notes in a model, you should delete them regularly to minimize the size of the model.

If you want to record additional information in your Change Notes, such as its status, apply Stereotypes and their Tag Definitions to Change Notes.

If you want to track the changes being made in your branch through Change Notes, we recommend the following strategy:

• Create a branch to implement all the changes required for a Change Note - use that Change Note to track changes only in the branch.

• After all changes have been made to implement the Change Note, reconcile the branch.