In today’s blog, we’re taking a closer look at one of the most impactful features introduced in the Polarion 20R1 release:
Collections. If you haven’t yet explored what’s new in this version, now’s a great time to do so. Collections offer a powerful way to manage and group together specific revisions or baselines of Polarion Live Documents. Whether in an open or closed state, a Collection acts as a structured container—allowing teams to capture consistent document sets for reviews, audits, or release planning. Let’s break down what makes this feature so valuable and how you can start using it effectively in your projects
So, you might be wondering: why would you want to create a collection of document revisions in Polarion? Great question.
Traditionally, Polarion Live Documents represent software requirements across various stages of the development lifecycle. While it was possible to organize documents into Spaces, these always reflected the current version of each document—making it difficult to capture a consistent set of document revisions at a particular point in time. With the introduction of Collections in Polarion 20R1, that challenge is finally addressed. Collections allow you to group specific document revisions or baselines together, providing a centralized, navigable set of artifacts—something our customers have often requested for audits, regulatory compliance, and milestone reviews.
Collections also enhance reuse. The same document revision or baseline can appear in multiple collections. This is especially helpful when different engineering teams are working on separate parts of a design but need to refer to the same version of a high-level specification. In such cases, each team can work within its own collection—tailored to their scope—while referencing the shared specification consistently across both collections.
One of the most powerful aspects of Collections is how Polarion makes context visually intuitive. When you open a document within a collection, the navigation pane on the left displays only the documents included in that collection. This focused view makes it easy to move between documents, follow trace links, and understand the overall scope. And if you step outside the collection context, Polarion clearly indicates that, so you never lose track of where you are.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.One particularly valuable feature of Collections in Polarion is how they handle links and traceability. A key design goal behind Collections was to ensure that all links between artifacts within a collection remain valid and consistent. Collections simplify the process of linking work items across documents included in the collection, making sure that your traceability remains reliable and contained.
If you attempt to create a link to a work item that does not reside within the collection, Polarion will alert you with an error helping prevent broken or out-of-context links. However, it’s possible that some existing links may already point to artifacts outside the collection. This can happen when links were created before the document was added to the collection.
To address this, Polarion 20R1 introduces a built-in Consistency Checker (see Figure 3). This tool scans the collection and identifies any links from documents or work items that point to targets outside the collection. It provides warnings so you can resolve these issues and ensure the collection remains self contained and traceable ideal for reviews, audits, and maintaining overall integrity.
Figure 3 – Consistency checker results
Now at the beginning of this blog I mentioned that collections are sets of document revisions. This is of course true, but the one thing I didn’t say was that collections can also contain head revisions, or current documents. There is one important rule though and that is that a document head revision can only be contained in one collection. This means that not only can collections be used for archiving and creating historic document revisions, they can also be used to work inside of with current document revisions, or a mix of current and historic document revisions.
The approach of working inside a collection is particularly supportive of parallel development activities. We touched on this during our Polarion 21R1 release blog post. In V-lifecycle development, organizations cannot wait for all the documents that represent the different levels of development to be completed before they move on to the next version or product release.
Figure 4 – The V-Lifecycle showing the concept of concurrent development
Often, higher-level documents for the next product release are developed in parallel with lower-level documents from the previous release. For example, as shown in Figure 4, Team C may be working on the high-level (HL) software specification version 2, while Team D is simultaneously working on the low-level (LL) software specification version 1.4.
Polarion collections make this type of V-lifecycle parallel development easier by allowing documents to be organized and developed concurrently. Collections ensure that the proper context is always maintained, and that links between documents remain valid. This reduces errors that could occur if someone were working with the wrong document revision. Once work on a product release is complete, the collection can be closed—freezing it against further changes. Only users with special permissions can reopen it for modifications.
Another important point to note is how traceability links behave inside a collection. If you create links from work items in a current document revision (head) back to work items in a previous revision or baseline for the first time, Polarion automatically displays the links (or backlinks) from the perspective of both revisions. In other words, traceability is visible in both directions.
In summary:
Collections provide an easy way to group document revisions, and a single revision can be reused across multiple collections. This makes them highly suitable for audit and regulatory compliance.
Collections also support concurrent work by mixing current and historic document revisions or baselines within the same context, making it simple to create valid links between them. When the work on a collection is complete, it can be closed and frozen—supporting parallel development activities within the V-lifecycle.
Collections allow teams to work on higher-level and lower-level documents for different product releases in parallel.
They maintain context and ensure links between documents stay valid, reducing the risk of errors.
Once a collection is closed, it becomes frozen and cannot be modified without special permissions.
Traceability links created inside collections are visible in both directions, ensuring complete visibility.
Collections support both regulatory/audit compliance and concurrent development within the V-lifecycle.
Labyrinth, powered by transformative science and technology, accelerates progress for organizations in their quest to address complex health challenges.
Quick Links
Locations
