Better way of handling large number of plans: Plan tree, with configuration inheritance?

Hello

At the moment I am creating test plans for one of our projects. However, I'm seen that the whole thing is going to become very difficult to manage very soon. For this project (and for a good number of other projects) we have a number of platforms to test, each with a number of C and Fortran compilers (vendors and versions), compilation options (static,shared) and environment options (libraries present or present, etc).

I see that for a single project the number of tests could already be close to 50, then multiply by 10-15. Not all are that complex but some are indeed so we could easily end with several hundreds of test plans. At the moment I am creating them with the "clone" feature (it would be good it is also initially copied project name and key, btw, because these tend to be variations of the cloned ones) but the whole thing is starting to get difficult to manage. I see two issues:

1. In the Project screen we will just have a quite long flat list, not every easy to spot things. I'm trying to use the names with some discipline so that things are sorted right, but this is not very nice.

2. If (when) I have to modify a value in the plans, I will have to re-do the change in tens of other similar plans. Very labor intensive and error prone.

So, wouldn't it be nice to organize the plans in a tree so that:

1. You can show/hide or open/close branches so that you can just ignore those that are building OK. It could give a nice visual hint to discover if a problem happens per architecture, os, compiler or compilation options.

2. Configuration (requirements, settings, etc) could be inherited from the parent plan in the tree. A child should be able to override any parameter but by default would have the same settings as the parent.

I believe that this would make the whole thing manageable. Do you have any other ideas?