View Configuration and Management

A view is a window through which you can access a subset of the artifacts in a project. Furthermore, a view uses items to reference artifacts and manage access to them. Depending on how it is configured, a view can:

• Serve as a sub-project for a specific development or maintenance activity.
• Be a read-only or updateable subset of another view.
• Be used for other purposes.

The good news is that views have tremendous flexibility to serve many needs. The bad news is that you can get unexpected or undesirable results if you don’t understand how the different view types work.

This section describes each view type, how it behaves, and when you might want to use it. It also discusses the roles views can fulfill for specific development activities and suggests practices for managing changes within a view and for propagating changes from one view to another.

In this section: