A variant is a lens over your items. When you pick a variant, every view shows the item versions pinned in that variant instead of the live ones, and each item is marked to show whether it belongs to the variant. Use it to work on one configuration of a product while the live items keep moving.
Variants are built on baselines: the variants you can pick are the baselines of your organization, and an item's pinned version in the variant is the version the baseline holds. See Creating baselines for how to put items into one.
Picking a variant
The Scope button sits in the page header and reads Scope: All items when no variant is active. Click it to open the picker, search by name and click a baseline; each row shows whether it is Editable or Frozen and when it was created. The button then reads **Scope: **. Click the **X** on the banner to go back to all items.
The scope follows you across the pages you explore: Items and single item view, Parameters, Baselines, Reviews, Test management, Saved filters, the Traceability Matrix, Analysis and the Dashboard. Set it once and every one of those pages shows the same configuration.
What changes in a variant
A banner naming the variant appears under the header, with a Variant items only switch and an X to leave the variant.
Items pinned at a version in the variant show that version and are read-only: their text cannot be edited in the document and their attributes are read-only in the sidebar. Items that are members at their latest version, and items outside the variant, show the live version.
The version badge of a pinned item gets a pin icon; a member at its latest version gets a live icon.
Membership dots
A small dot marks membership on tree rows, on row and column headers in the Traceability Matrix, on graph nodes and on the version badge in document view. A solid dot means Variant member; a faint dot means Contains variant members, so a parent whose children are in the variant; no color means Not in variant. Hover the dot to read the label.
Showing only the variant's items
Turn on Variant items only in the banner to hide everything that is neither a member of the variant nor an ancestor of a member. The tree, the document and the other views shrink to the variant's content. Turn it off to see all items again while keeping the variant's versions.
Which baselines are meant to be variants
Any baseline can be used as a variant, which is not always what you want in an organization with many of them. Mark the ones that are: Set as Variant in a baseline's settings, or Set as variant in its details sidebar, gives it a Variant tag. The Baselines table has a Variants column and a filter for it, so the list can be narrowed to the baselines the team treats as configurations. See Viewing and managing baselines.