Understanding the Significance of Requirements Collaboration

Requirements Management plays a significant role in ultimate success of the project. A completely functional Requirements Management tool is essential for an efficient and optimal management of requirements. In a distributed project, Collaboration and Reusability are the two facets of Requirements Management which can be of considerable assistance. A group using documents for Requirements Management will be compelled to upgrade to a tool based Requirements Management.

In the recent software development practices, Collaboration has become a necessity among various groups working from different geographical locations. Collaboration is the basis for working together to share information and to accomplish common tasks, and of all phases of software development life cycle, it is the Requirement Management phase that exceedingly demands collaboration. This is especially due to the fact that various globally distributed stakeholders need to be involved in creating, reviewing and approving Requirements.

It is therefore necessary to have an application that provides a collaborative knowledge management infrastructure for distributed teams. It needs to be a web-based customizable solution, offers multiple avenues to work collaboratively to manage requirement. It also needs to provide

·         Anywhere and anytime access

A user needs to have identity authentication so that the application can be accessed over the Internet from any geographic location. Maintenance and Upgrades to the software are seamless to the end-user and are of light over-head to the IT departments.

·         Email notifications to any email addresses.

Notifications can be generated manually on an ad-hoc basis or can be automated. An email enabled mobile phone can be used for interacting with these email notifications thereby allowing users to collaborate with the rest of the team when they are physically apart.

·         Multi-threaded Discussions

As the fundamental activity of a team is make decisions on the opinions of its team members, multi-threaded discussions offer an opportunity to communicate such comments in a more ordered way, reducing the need to have costly meetings. These discussion-threads thereby permit one to capture an entire account of the decision making process.

·         Integration with Visual Studio Eclipse IDEs

The industry’s principal Integrated Development Environments (IDE) is the Visual Studio Integration Team System and Eclipse. Developers need a service integration bus to integrate and share information with Business Analysts, Architects, Project Managers and Testers, etc. Instead of starting another tool external to the IDE, the developers using these IDEs choose to collaborate within their

preferred development environment.

·         Collaboration with Process Automation

The process designer of an application needs to be capable of supporting workflow/process with sequential activities as well as concurrent activities. This establishes collaboration between a set of users working on Requirements, and another set of users working on related Design Elements.

·         Customized Workplace

A successful Requirements Management team includes stakeholders of various disciplines which help in getting inputs from various perspectives early in the project lifecycle and increases the prospect of a project’s success. By presenting the same information to the diverse users, the user is either overloaded with too much information or crippled with a lack of information. Requirements Management needs to be customizable and multiple visual interface to promote collaboration at a number of levels.

Reusing requirements

Requirements reusability permits users to use well defined, reviewed and approved Requirements from different situations. The situations could differ in terms of diverse projects, different customers, different products or even different releases of the same product.

An adequate Requirements Management tool can help a distributed project in achieving collaborative Requirements Management with extraordinary degree of reusability which can significantly diminish the development time and risks.

Learn more about: -  IT Service Management solution

Importance of Integrated ALM

Integrated Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) was evolved over the last ten years or so. Trying to achieve end-to-end ALM has been quite the pipe dream for various vendors. The past 2 years has seen something different emerge as there are newer technologies that are maturing in highly critical production systems and are bringing forth some long overdue benefits of Integrated Application Lifecycle Management to real development. In the current scenario, enterprises need to think about integrated ALM, and in this article we shall discuss just why integrated ALM is an essential and important enterprise tool. 

Integrated ALM allows the easy viewing of artifacts that may be managed by one tool to another tool. This includes test cases from Requirements Management Tool and Requirements from the Test case Management Tool, or even list of design objects from the IDE. This further means that even multiple artifacts are more accessible from a single tool therefore every stakeholder can access the artifacts from other tools without leaving their own tool environment. This promotes collaboration and early problem detection and also reduces errors and costs. Such an integrated ALM tool can easily create various impacting and non-impacting relationships between any two artifacts effortlessly. This facilitates the traceability relation between a Requirement in Requirements Management Tool and Test case in the Test Management Tool; so that when the Requirement changes in one tool the Test case in the other tool will be flagged for impact. Without such traceability, QA group might end up testing an obsolete requirement without even knowing that they were doing so!

Integrated ALM tools when equipped with the right product support and maintenance can ensure that processes can be automated across tool boundaries to easily implement a total ALM lifecycle with zero breaks. For instance, any change that starts its life in a Helpdesk tool as a Ticket can get automatically replicated as a Change Request in the Issues/ Change Management tool. Further it be approved by a Change Control Board then it can go to the architect to create/ modify architectural artifacts in the Designer/ Modeling tool. Next it will move to the developer for coding and to QA for creating Test cases in IDE and Test Management tools. It is an absolute necessity to have an automated workflow process.  Typically manual interfaces between tools when managed by emails and unstructured documents can sometimes result in dropping in losing out some important processes. 

Integrated ALM tools can also help enterprises manage projects and resources across tools without too much of difficulties. Development managers in enterprises often struggle with queries such as “how to ascertain “the Release date given a set of Resources?,“what Requirements, Changes and Defects can we put in this release?‟ or „Given a Release date and a set of Requirements, Changes and Defects, what kind of resources are required?‟  Integrated ALM can easily be the panacea to all such queries since it can manage all the artifacts in the mix with ease.

 

Read more about change management process  & requirements traceability

Queries checklist for best Requirements tool

Requirements management tools are important for an enterprise and there are a number of specific requirements that are needed, so here is ready-made query checklist for you to look at while you consider the right requirements management tool.

• Does your requirements management tool offer formatting tools that can include multiple Undo-Redo, symbols and embedded link to other Requirements?
• Can you be assured of the requirement management tools promise of delivering specific attributes for each requirement?
• Does your tool offer best requirements management training to ensure correct implementation of processes?
• Does your requirements tool allow for best test management?
• Can the tool prioritize requirements such as collaborative ranking, decision support system, etc?
• Is the tool’s configurability flexible to accommodate different philosophies of managing requirements?
• Can the tool effectively handle change requests?
• Can you ably associate non-conformance to a requirement without too much of a hassle?
• Can it define a workflow for requirement revision process internally without too much trouble?
• Is the tool able to help you keep track of costs (including planned costs, actual costs, etc.) for every requirement?
• Does the tool inherently possess the element of showcasing interdependencies between various requirements?
• Can it create sub requirements and nesting of sub-items right up to n-levels?
• Does your tool allow you to create requirements traceability relationships among the records of the same entity?
• Can your tool offer optimized visual hierarchy of requirements with multiple many-to-many relations?
• Can your tool offer multiple views for requirements with controls such as view and filter?
• Can you keep a track of requirements as well as modifications and edits made in the same?
• Does the tool allow for you to view the entire lifecycle of a requirement including all the interdependencies along the way?
• Does the tool allow you to view the originator of the requirement for possible future references along with the ability to also view the location of when the requirement originated?
• Is it possible to view everything and each requirement that affects and impacts any facility?
• Does the tool accord for version control?
• Is it possible for the tool to design documents in version history while also being able to trace requirement to a source file?
• Does the tool allow for viewing of all traceability relations?
• Does your tool allow for best reporting features such as html reports, excel reports, crystal reports, word reports, etc?

Hopefully these for e mentioned top queries checklist can provide enterprises with some insight on what to expect from an optimized requirements management tool.

Learn more about: -  Application lifecycle management & IT service Management.

Benefits and Features of ITSM as a Single Solution Offering

An IT Service Management (ITSM) Studio ideally offers a workflow based configurable global platform for implementing ITSM processes distributed over multiple geographic locations and across multiple organizations, accessed 24x7 over the Web. ITSM is available as both On-Premise and Software as a Service (SaaS) offering.

Some salient features of a successful ITSM are

Customizable Workspace:
The workspace is available with industry-standard components of ITSM and are defined with a set of standard attributes (ITIL v3 compliant), which a user can change as per his/her business needs.

Process Automation:  
Processes are managed by the built-in process automation workflow engine. The workflow of all transactional entities-Service Request, Incident, Problem and Change- are automated and task-based, eliminating the risk of human error associated with manual intervention.

End-to-End Traceability:  
Traceability is an advanced ITSM feature that allows a user to manage functional dependencies between Service Requests, Incidents, Problems and Change Management, or a combination of these. Incident becomes easier by setting a traceability relation between transactional components.

Automated Business Rules:
Policy refers to 'business rule' that executes certain actions based on an occurrence of a particular event, schedule, escalation parameters or validation of an event. With the help of enterprise service bus architecture ITSM Studio can provides the facility to implement service-oriented business rules in terms of Policies.

Multiple Input Methods:
Any item such as Service Request, Incident or Change Request can be captured using rich text editor, submitting through a corporate website or portal, sending via email, importing from MS Word, MS Excel and configurable CSV file, and by using any third party tools in real time if synchronized.

Consolidated Reports:
Graphical and non-graphical reports help Service Managers evaluate the quality of service operation, service delivery and distribution of IT assets/Configuration Items among the customers. An ITSM Studio generally allows for the creation of a wide array of reports that can be created separately for each ITSM component. Getting these real time reports with an accurate data helps make faster decisions.

Dashboards:
ITSM provides ready-to-use Dashboard Reports exposed through different gadgets. Viewing all reports from one place helps the manager do less navigation in the solution and make quick decisions on service operations and service delivery.

Benefits of ITSM as a Single Solution Offering

Business benefits
In any service organization, Implementation of IT processes compliant to ITIL v3, strengthens the business process and improves the quality of Service Operations and Service Delivery. Meeting customer expectations and understanding what is expected by a customer becomes amply clear to service providers. Therefore, in a customer-focused business operation, there is enhancement of customer satisfaction and the probability of customer retention.

Financial benefits:
By virtue of ITIL best practices, the three major components of a service organization – People, Process, and Technology – get streamlined, reducing the cost of service operations. For example, the services are not over-engineered by introducing customer-focused service operations or the recurrence of Problems can be prevented by implementing a well-defined root-cause analysis and by adopting change implementation process, the impact of change in the business can be optimized.

Financial benefits:
ITSM does not undermine the right synchronization of ‘People’ and ‘Process’ in IT service operations. IT service operations become more customer-focused, letting employees clearly know their responsibilities by adopting ITIL best practices. Using Self-Service portal or Service Catalog employees become more motivated and productive.

Employee benefits:
ITSM has a straight forward approach towards ‘roles and responsibilities’ of people participating in IT service operations. So, even if different service groups are involved in a process, each of them knows their area of operations and responsibilities on a reported Service Request,

Internal benefits:
ITSM has a straight forward approach towards ‘roles and responsibilities’ of people participating in IT service operations. So, even if different service groups are involved in a process, each of them knows their area of operations and responsibilities on a reported Service Request, Incident, Problem or a Change. The inter-team communication and collaboration improves as different workgroups or roles get synchronized in a process.

A single solution with all the required built-in applications for IT service Management Solution brings a great advantage to organizations small to very large.

Learn more about: - application lifecycle management & integration bus.

Using ALM tools to achieve IT governance and compliance

Governance and compliance have become important elements in the overall control and health of a large enterprise. These two elements have become mandated competencies for any enterprise that wants to stay in business in our present day’s global technology-centric environment. All public companies are mandated by Federal laws which include section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 that stands for establishing effective practices such as reporting and operational controls such as Change Management. There are quite a few procedures have a number of standards and frameworks that can help implement such practices which includes IEEE 12207 lifecycle processes, ISACA Cobit 4.1, SEI CMMI and the itSMF ITIL v 3.  

The Sarbanes-Oxley law has given the right impetus for enterprises to review their reporting and operational controls. Yet there are quite a few enterprises who failed to achieve improved productivity through their effective implementation of these controls. An unsuccessful failed audit can have enterprises scrambling to quickly meet the letter of the law in order to stay compliant. Such instances may cause gross loss of competitive advantage. Implementing improved controls and processes can provide the enterprise with the potential to enhance their productivity and value.

Enterprises should engage such application lifecycle management tools that helps remove the ambiguity and realize improved productivity through the proper implementation of the Cobit 4.1 framework and, effortlessly aids enterprises to achieve the objectives of IT Governance and compliance. Such ALM tools when coupled with the right kind of requirements management tools can help enterprises define the exact tasks necessary to implement each of the control practices required to meet the control objective of “setting up formal change management procedures to handle in a standardized manner all requests (including maintenance and patches) for changes to applications, procedures, processes, system and service parameters, and the underlying platforms”. It can help develop, document, and promulgate a change management framework that specifies the policies and processes including the diverse roles and responsibilities, it can help classify and prioritize all changes based on business risk, authorize and approve all changes by the business process owners and IT and also help track the status of changes.

Optimized ALM tools can also help establish and maintain version control over all changes by assisting in the implementation of roles and responsibilities that involve business process owners and appropriate technical IT functions. Furthermore it can ensure appropriate segregation of duties. These tools can assist in establishing appropriate record management practices and audit trails to record key steps in the change management process and can help ensure timely closure of changes. These tools can help enterprises in allowing only authorized personnel to enter specific requested changes, organized by predefined categories.

Implementing IT Governance and compliance is all about confirming that things are done at the right time and in the right manner. It also concerns requirements traceability and providing visibility to all stakeholders.

Learn more about :-  alm solutions   &  integration bus

Prerequisites of an Agile Solution

An agile solution can be used to implement various tools necessary in a distributed development scenario. Configurability is an important element, since the solution needs to be extended and further configured to incorporate any organizational needs which may be beyond pre-defined methodology definitions. The agile solution needs to support artifacts, entities and objects including projects, releases, sprints, product backlogs, daily scrum meetings, test cases, issues/changes. Therefore an agile solution needs to have the ability to deal with multiple project release, capture all major meeting aspects, engage in optimized traceability relations and integrate visual issues, process designs and handle implementations.

Effective application lifecycle management solutions should not require too much product support and maintenance. Therefore such agile solutions need to be able to selectively import from various sources including previous projects. Managing backlogs and entities is an important step since these backlog items are assigned to different users independent of their locations, therefore agile solutions should allow for user access from anywhere anytime. Additionally it should also offer ways to manage tools and categorize high level requirements optimally. An efficient agile solution can also offer best change management solution that can allow users and project members to enter various Backlogs as Issues/ defects/ change and enhancement requests. Also it should allow for routing of these items through appropriate workflows based on the backlog types. Risks management is also an important feature of such an agile solution, wherein risks can be entered, tracked and related to backlog Items.

The solution should support planning and allow for best traceability view by which users can get a complete visibility to all the artifacts that are linked to one another which eventually would facilitate in either tracing forward or backward starting from any particular artifact. The solution should also account for discussion-threads that allows one to capture a complete history of the decision making process. It should support multi-threaded discussions in terms of Contextual Comments and offer a built-in comments section that can be exposed to the users via system pre-defined or custom defined forms. This section enables users to carry out multi-threaded discussions in the context of each Backlog. A drag-and-drop graphical designer in the agile solution can offer numerous benefits including better design, implementation, enforcement and automation. Such a solution will ensure that tasks will be automatically created for one or more users based on roles they play. Also it will ensure that when the tasks are completed the process creates a new set of tasks for a new set of users. These are the prerequisites for an optimized agile solution that will ensure best process management.

Learn more about: - issue management tools  & Requirements management tool

Different Approaches to an Integrated ALM

Integrated Application Lifecycle Management is one of the most sought-after aspects of software development process. Technologies are bringing in multiple advantages of Integrated ALM to real development as they are maturing in highly critical production systems. An organization today is missing out on some compelling benefits, it is not thinking about an integrated ALM.
In a development organization there are quite a few challenges to introduce and implement Integrated ALM successfully. Some of them are:

• Multi vendor tools use multiple technologies.
• The software being produced uses wide range of technologies.
• The tools use various data repositories.
• The tools are geographically distributed.

The different approaches to an Integrated ALM

Approach One: Point-to-point Integrated Multi Vendor Tools

Traditionally the individual vendors have tried to achieve modicum of Integrated ALM by first integrating their own ALM point tools and then integrating some selection of the popular point tools from other vendors. It is necessary to create integration between a particular pair of tools. Although to achieve the functionality and benefits, a point-to-point integration between most, if not every pair of tools is required. As the integration is often done between tools from two different vendors, it often becomes the users’ responsibility to create a workable integration using their own development resources.

Limitations of Point-to-point Integrated Multi Vendor Tools

·         Complexity of combinations

A point-to-point integration between every pair of n tools requires n x (n-1) / 2 number of integrations. Because of the ad-hoc nature of these integrations, it becomes particularly complex to create and maintain each individual integration code between the pairs of tools.

·         Handcrafted Integration Business Rules

Integration codes are custom made for particular pairs of tools, and it has maximum flexibility although maintenance becomes very cumbersome. Changes in the code mean a full cycle of development, test, and deployment cycle, and it therefore becomes impossible to implement even the smallest change quickly.

Some development groups are abandoning their custom point-to-point integration projects and large service companies with enough in-house software expertise and bandwidth are looking for a replacement of their handcrafted internal integration rats-nest architecture with a more sustainable and scalable solution.

Approach 2: Single Vendor Integrated ALM Tools

Large vendors are coming up with their own solutions to the Integrated ALM, Because of the problems faced by point-to-point integration architecture. Though their solutions vary in actual implementation, they can be grouped in the category of ‘single vendor solutions’. While these solutions also aim at including third party vendor tools, the current implementations on the market do not meet these needs.

The limitations of a single vendor integrated ALM tools approach are recapped below:

·         Rip and Replace

Apart from the difficulty of economic justification of replacing existing tools by a single vendor tools, such a move results in retraining of the development team members in new tools, which may delay development projects unnecessarily.

·         One Size Fits All

It is highly unlikely that built-in tools from a single vendor can serve the needs of a wide range of development groups. However, due to the very nature of the solutions, the users are forced to use these tools even when better and often less expensive (sometime free open source) tools are available and appropriate for their needs. Single vendor tool creates a technology with little or no chance of working together.

Approach 3: Multi Vendor Best of Breed Integrated ALM Tools by ALM Middleware

The concept of ALM middleware addresses all the Integrated ALM requirements squarely by taking a cue from the integration solutions in other industries. It also avoids all issues and pitfalls that occur in the other two approaches of point to point and single vendor integrations. The middleware technology is based on Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architecture, which has some distinct advantages over any point-to-point integration architecture. These advantages are discussed below:

·         Significantly simpler development

·         Protect Investments

·         Best Tools for Best Functions

·         Flexibility of Integration Business Rules

·         Analytics and Dashboards

·         Flexibility of Integration Business Rules

In the above mentioned three approaches to integrated application lifecycle management, the method of ALM Middleware is the most suitable method for implementing Integrated ALM in organizations having or needing multiple vendor tools.

Learn more about: - integration bus.