Best Baselining Tools for Software Projects

Baselining commonly refers to a set of stored values or benchmarks that form a basis of or serve as a reference to help determine whether a project is on or off track. Baselines help oversee the entire project, monitor performance, spot potential problems, and easily identify areas for change. Information in a baseline cannot be modified, so it provides a reliable way to view historical information about products and milestones.

A baseline in project management is a clearly defined starting point for your project plan. It is a fixed reference point to measure and compare your project’s progress against. This allows you to assess the performance of your project over time. Baselines can cover a large variety of data points and largely fall into the following categories:

Scope baseline – the technical, physical and functional requirements for delivering products

Schedule baseline – the project schedule and its supporting data

Cost baseline – a budget in a time distribution format - to manage overall cost

Quality/Risk baseline – the known possible changes or risks that could impact the performance of the project

In software testing, baselining refers to benchmarking the performance of the application. Baseline testing refers to the validation of the documents and specifications on which test cases are designed. Baseline testing metrics are recorded after the applications undergo performance testing and allows users to review what changed, saving time, providing insight, and making collaboration easier.

We have found a number of great software platforms that offer a baselining capability as part of their Application Lifecycle Management Software:

#1. SpiraPlan

SpiraPlan is a complete, enterprise-level program management solution that comes with an easy-to-use and powerful baseline management module. With SpiraPlan, users can set up robust configuration management and version control for artifacts in their projects and products. Baselining in SpiraPlan strengthens the users' ability to manage requirements, test cases and other QA-related artifacts, and is especially useful for managing complex systems and engineering projects in regulated industries. SpiraPlan’s baselining functionality can be enabled for specific products or projects without complicating all the other projects in the user's portfolio. The centralised baseline administration feature lets product administrators see all of the baselines in the current product. SpiraPlan’s baseline artifact change section is where users can see a consolidated set of artifact changes that have occurred in between various versions and point in time.

Pricing: Sliding pricing scale; $139.99/ per 3 users /per month; Concurrent licensing model.

Free trial of SpiraPlan is available.

Deployment: Saas and on premise/air-gapped

#2. Visure

Visure is first and foremost a requirements management tool inside a collaborative ALM platform. Visure is designed for managing engineering requirements of safety-critical and business-critical systems. The platform efficiently implements requirements lifecycle management with the highest quality in the development of systems and services while drastically reducing total life cycle costs. Some of it’s top features include Configuration Management, Baselining, History Tracking, Requirements Versioning and Report Management. Configuration management and baseline functionality covers the generation of full or partial baselines, baseline comparison, and electronic signature on baselines. Visure integrates with other tools such as DOORS, Jama, Siemens Polarion, PTC, Perforce, JIRA, Enterprise Architect, HP ALM, Microfocus ALM, PTC, TFS, Word, Excel, Test RT, RTRT, VectorCAST, LDRA and other tools.

Pricing: Pricing upon request

Free trial available.

Deployment: SaaS, on-premise

#3. Easy Projects

Easy Projects is a project management platform with a focus on providing customers with easy visualization options. The platform is designed to suit the needs of individuals, teams or entire companies. Easy Projects comes with a project baselining features, that is accompanied by a quick project planner, Gantt Chart, and WBS. Baselines allow the user to evaluate the performance of their project through plan comparisons and create a timeline of screencaps of their process plan, allowing them to easily compare their past statuses against their current performance in the Gantt Chart. Some top features included with baselines are their implementation in the Gantt Chart (visualization and free ability to create and delete within the chart itself), unlimited baseline creation, and easy to use comparison functions.

Pricing: $24 per team / per month

Free trial available.

Deployment: SaaS, on-premise

#4. Orcanos | ALM

Orcanos Software provides a consolidated solution for Application Lifecycle and Quality Management Systems. Orcanos pours its significant expertise into helping healthcare device manufacturing and technological companies with full featured offering that includes baselining. Orcanos ALM comes with software baseline management features that are built in to allow users to store and separately handle multiple version views of a test case without the duplication of data. The platform can be configured to offer a branch option that allows users to split the test case into two linked versions.

Price: $990 / per 10 users / per month

Free trial available

Deployment: SaaS

#5. Codebeamer

Codebeamer by Intland is an open Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform for software and product development. Since release 5.5, Codebeamer includes both document versioning and wiki baselining. The creation of a new baseline is easy. Users take snapshots of their contents and save it allowing for versioning of such contents. In the baseline module, users can store references to specific revisions which have previously existed. In Codebeamer, baselines are useful for audit purposes due to their comparison features. Additionally, Codebeamer supports cross referenced Wiki documents. When a baseline that includes Wiki documents is saved, references to all the documents are those of the specific revision at that state.

Pricing: €90 / per user / per month

Free trial is available.

Deployment: SaaS

#6. LoadView

Loadview by DotcomMonitor is primarily a load testing tool for DevOps teams that focus on stress testing websites, APIs, and web applications. Loadview’s cloud-based systems allow users to simulate any possible test scenario with a variety of geographical performance testing environments. Loadview comes with baselining features that work in tandem with performance tests, especially in the load curve. The Load Curve feature easily allows users to fine-tune baseline and benchmark metrics and adjust website load of performance tests based on your requirements. Once tests are executed, a report is also generated that allows users to compare the results of specified metrics.

Price: $199.00 per user / per month.

Free trial and a free version are available.

Deployment: SaaS

#7. IBM Rational ClearCase

IBM Rational®ClearCase is an enterprise level configuration management system that provides controlled access to user’s software assets. The platform offers version control, build management, automated workspace and baseline management management functionality. Elements are organized into components by the project manager and versions are stored in baselines that users can review and monitor for changes over time. IBM Rational®ClearCase baselines allow users to create a development stream or rebase a previously created one. Developers can populate their work areas with the resources represented in baseline versions on project or at specific stream levels. Basenining allows for all members to have identical file sets and resources when they enter new teams and streamlines the assigning of sets process.

Pricing: Price upon request

No free trial available.

Deployment: Desktop

#8. Tuleap

Tuleap is an enterprise solution that brings all your tools in one place while providing users with a highly customizable platform that encompasses a range of processes. This allows for easy collaboration across teams, from the business to developer teams. Tuleap’s baselining features are great for audit purposes and for keeping track of different versions. With Tuleap, users are able to create snapshots in time of chosen requirements or stories of a specific release and save the release scope at an agreed time. With this, managers are then able to make achievable commitments, assign staffing levels and create budgets as needed. Users are easily able to browse earlier baselines and compare them against others to see the changes over time in the release.

Pricing: €5.00 / per user / per month

Free trial and a free version are available.

Deployment: SaaS

#9. LiquidPlanner

LiquidPlanner is a project management tool that grows and adjusts to the changing needs of the business. When a user’s priorities change, the software will automatically update these changes. LiquidPlanner’s built-in prediction features, including baselining views, help predict when the work will be completed. Such features allow for high-performing teams to schedule, trace, and manage their collaborative work. They also offer cross-project visibility which allows users to see into the progress, budgets, and risk for multiple or all their projects at once. The baseline view helps users visualize how project plans keep pace with earlier projections, exceeding them, or falling behind.Users are able to see the project's original estimated effort and how that compares to the amount of work actually done. The insights gained from using this view improve the accuracy of future project planning so you can set your projects and team up for success.

Pricing: Small Team ($9.99/month), Professional ($39/month) and Enterprise ($69/month).

Free version available.

Deployment: SaaS

#10. Project Baseline

Project Baseline by Verily is a project management tool that enables health workers to easily contribute to and help shape the new generation of healthcare tools and supplies. The platform offers a good set of baselining functionality - including scope baselines, cost baselines, and schedule baselines. Project Baseline allows users to visualise their project values leaving room for easy comparison between values and actual performance. The platform helps keep track of the user's real-time progress of each project. The tool comes pre-configured especially for medical and research industries with it’s visual comparison tools and scope baselines.

Pricing: Upon request

Deployment: Saas