Whenever you want to work on your TARA project with a newer version of itemis SECURE, e.g. a new release, your project has to be migrated to make sure it stays up to date with the current model-schemata. This migration will do the heavy lifting for you and take care of adding necessary preparations for you to use new features, re-organize data and data locations where new structures and formats were introduced to simplify model processing, as well as removing any remnants of older formats used. These types of project migrations are not limiting you in terms of the possible migration path forward. The only thing to recognize is, the more versions you skip the more migrations have to be executed at once. This can make it slightly more complex to spot the root cause of issues, should a migration happen to fail. To avoid such problems, we recommend to migrate your TARA projects to the newest itemis SECURE version as soon as possible and don’t skip to many new releases.
In order to regularly keep the itemis SECURE code base up to date and maintainable, so that we can on the one hand offer long term support and new features in an organized way and on the other hand swiftly identify and also counteract published weaknesses, we periodically clean out parts of the code that aren’t used anymore. This has the drawback, that some releases will not be able to migrate all older projects anymore, as some itemis SECURE versions will delete linking steps between the older releases and the current version, hence breaking the migration chain for affected projects. Therefore, projects require to be migrated with specific versions in case release versions were skipped, before these projects can be transitioned to the latest release.
To assist and guide you with this additional process step, we provide a project checker. This project checker runs each time a project is loaded to properly identify required migration steps and lists itemis SECURE versions that are required for the migration path.
Note: In some versions, the dialog won’t directly accept a freshly migrated project. If you are certain that your project is properly migrated with a required itemis SECURE version, trying a second time to open the project should always work. So we kindly ask you to just give it a second try.
We avoid restrictions as much as possible when it comes to the migration path you have to take in order to migrate older projects, but to keep up with the ongoing events of discovered and published weaknesses, this process of removing unused code eventually will happen more frequently than it did in the past. Therefore we encourage you to keep your project up to date with current itemis SECURE versions and don’t skip versions too much.
So far we followed a process in which there are specific releases that will be mandatory for any project that should be migrated from an older version to a newer version. These are relatively rare, but make it necessary to install these particular versions, should you be faced with a project older than that release. Between these mandatory releases, which transition a project between specific (symbolic or technical) phases of itemis SECURE, any project should in theory be perfectly forward compatible until you hit the next phase-transition. Should you encounter issues when migrating any project, feel free to contact us and we will investigate the issue together with you.
This process will most likely change in the future to reduce the reliance on any particular release. This is especially crucial if you operate under a policy where every particular release has to be vetted first. When this happens, we will update this guide accordingly and openly communicate the new process in the context of the release-communication.
At this point, the following itemis SECURE versions are considered mandatory: