Please forgive the rookie question, but is there an easy way to compare baselines across an entire project? I see how to compare baslines for individual requirements, but I'm looking for a global way to determine the difference on a project between baselines.
thanks,
Dan
If you want to compare all the items in a project, viewing different baselines, your best bet is to use a Custom Report. Here is a link to the guide we have on how to create those . Contour uses a tool called BIRT to do custom reporting. It's a way to customize a query for your database, and then display that in various formats (HTML, Word, PDF, Excel, etc.). I am guessing that you want to print this out. Let me know if am I on the right track here.
Thanks for the response. I suppose that would work, but it's much clunkier than it should be. I was under the impression that managing and comparing baselines was a core feature for Contour. I might be mistaken here, but it seems that writing custom reports is a fairly static thing, that you wouldn't want to have to do for every baseline out there that you might want to compare to every other baseline. For us we'd be looking for a quick- "what changed on the project this week?" Or "what's changed since the end of our elaboration phase?". That also infers that comparing a baseline to 'current/latest' would be possible. Does that make sense?
thanks,
Dan
Currently we do use custom reporting for all baseline comparison. They allow you to enter any two baselines and compare them, or compare any baseline to the current item. We are looking to get this feature into Contour without reporting at some point, but the custom reports are a solid solution for now. We can talk more about the custom reports and how to integrate them if you would like. They are a useful tool in showing what has changed throughout a project.
One question that has come up for me in writing these reports, what exactly are you trying to see when you look at what has changed? The idea of watching a project grow and change is a concept we are very interested in, so it would be interesting to see exactly which types of fields matter the most. For example, are you mostly interested in seeing status changes, or are any changes throughout the item of interest to you?
Version 2.4 of Contour will include 2 baseline report parameters for comparison. Using BIRT, you should now be able to get a comparison of two baselines directly from Contour. Let me know if you need any help setting up this report.
Hi Stephano,
I must be blind, because I can't find this new feature in Contour 2.4.1. When I click on the 'Reports' feature, I only see the following predefined reports:
Artifact List by Group
Release Plan
System Specification
System Specification
System Specification
Task List with Estimates
Trace Relationships
User List
Where can I find the new predefined reports?
thanks,
Dan
Thank you for that catch. They had not been enabled to the public. For those of you on hosted, they are now visible.
For those of you that host your own instance of Contour, please see below for instructions.
Sorry, but I'm not following those instructions. They say "log into Contour as system administrator and click on the Reports tab", but I can't find a 'Reports' tab. I have a 'Reports' link on the top of the screen, but that only allows me to select existing reports, not upload any new ones.
thanks,
Dan
"system administrator" is sometimes used to refer to "root" user in our documentation.
Sorry for the mixup there.
There should be a user called "root" with the password "password" (unless you've changed it). That is the user responsible for loading reports into the system.
Let me know if you have no idea what the password is and I can reset it for you.
Thanks Stephano. I hadn't known about the root login before. We've never needed it ![]()
I have the reports loaded now. They're pretty hard to read, but much better than nothing. Thanks for your help.
Dan
