One of the most difficult aspects of building solid technology is setting up the lines of communication in your organization. No out-of-the-box solution will solve all of your organization’s data and communication needs. However, a good policy is to err on the side of too much information, and subsequently pare back your tools and systems as your organization becomes more consistent in its delivery of your product, as teams adjust to working together, and as your overall business processes become more refined.
One software company’s experience may sound familiar to some. It was a growing company with a largely development-centric management team. They were growing quickly, finding it more and more difficult to manage their development efforts on the small, homegrown system they had created. They decided to make the move to ClearCase for source code and product management. For issue management, the company had already deployed a support desk application, and they made a weak attempt to use this platform to solve all of their internal issue-tracking needs. The tools did not map to their existing processes very well, and they had to be supplemented by an increasingly overwhelming number of management and team meetings to keep the flow of information up to date across the development organization and also to help prioritize rapidly changing product enhancements and issues. In short, the attempted solution wasn’t working.
After the organization started using ClearCase to solve some of the major support system issues, someone on the development team read in the ClearCase product information and licensing agreement that the company had also bought ClearQuest software. With the software paid for, and an obvious need to put a more robust defect and enhancement-tracking solution in place, the management team authorized an engineer to spend half of his time to roll out a solution. Within two days, he had the tool running and mapped to some of the more critical product workflows. Over the course of the next month, the solution was integrated with the help desk application, and the product management team was plugged into the system. This important step ensured that all participants in the product development lifecycle—not just development and quality assurance—were part of the system.
Our point in sharing this experience? ClearQuest is a tool that can be deployed very quickly, and it adds value immediately. Any new application can seem daunting, but quickly looking at ClearQuest’s primary functions and navigating through the main user controls will illustrate how user-friendly this application really is. However, the first step is to know and understand the basics.
If you’re going to sell your management team—or your development organization—on the decision to deploy ClearQuest, you need to have a good understanding of how change requests will work within your organization and how ClearQuest will interact with current and future systems.
Not every ClearQuest user works in a software development organization, so a change request should not be equated to just a software bug. A change request could take the form of a defect report, an enhancement request, or a feature request. Defects could be bugs, design flaws, or reports of irregular behaviors inside an application or on a product. Enhancements could be internal or external requests for changes to a product to modify an incomplete operation, fulfill a user expectation, or help bridge a functional gap in a product or solution. Finally, a feature request could be something that takes an existing product in a whole new direction, creates a new application, or brings to light a new technique or approach.
Everyone who interacts with a product or application should be viewed as a customer, and all customers should have some kind of mechanism in place to provide feedback. All customers want to see their requests answered by your company and hopefully incorporated into future product plans.
Change requests don’t just happen in a vacuum. They must be reviewed, prioritized, tracked, and executed.
Most companies have developed lengthy and detailed processes to receive and handle change requests in a timely fashion. Each type of change request should be defined in a standardized way; in an Internet world, users and customers expect a quick response to any request. Your process should categorize change requests, which will help establish a timely and consistent model for your responses.
A centralized change- and defect-tracking tool allows your company to work together to resolve issues and decreases the chances of overlap by different teams. It also provides a critical resource for determining metrics against your defects and enhancement databases.
By organizing your processes around defect and change requests, you’ll see an improvement in many aspects of the product development lifecycle. A simple process would include the following steps.
Change requests are made for a product or project.
These requests are organized in one central location.
A formal change review process is established; this process specifies the proper actions to take for each request type.
Managers assign tasks appropriately and schedule tasks for their resolution.
The tracking process should be reviewed regularly and refined as necessary to keep up with the growth and expansion of the company.
ClearQuest is a valuable beast of burden. As the IBM Rational marketing team expressed in its online promotional materials, by using ClearQuest—in conjunction with ClearCase—as a complete CM solution, you can relate changes made to software components and web content to the requests that triggered those changes. In essence, you’ll be not only taking advantage of the full potential of your ClearCase software’s capabilities but also enhancing your entire change management solution.
It could be that your existing tools are inefficient, and you need something more robust and capable of deep integration with other tools—or it could be that your process has become more complex with the maturity of your company or organization, and you need ClearQuest for its flexibility and, well, integration. We’re assuming you’ve personally already been sold on the benefits of ClearQuest and have deployed it or are planning to deploy it as your software development team’s default defect- and enhancement-tracking tool. That’s really only the first step. Where do you go from there? Well, have you thought about how this tool will integrate with the rest of your operations?
Have you looked at the possible use cases for expanding the tool across your various business processes or for integrating it with your other applications? Before you answer yes, answer the following questions.
Have you looked at the business needs for extending your issue/enhancement-tracking capabilities?
Have you queried your developers, your project managers and analysts, or even your customers about their needs?
Have you made plans for integrating ClearQuest with your other Rational tools? (They don’t call it a “tool suite” for nothing, you know.)
Have you looked outside of the Rational tool suite for tool and process integration opportunities?
When you want to expand this important functionality, it’s usually best to start with some kind of business needs analysis. Maybe you work for an organization that is small enough or flexible enough to make software purchases and integration decisions without a bunch of hoopla, but most of us need to justify the time and expense. We need to provide upper management with a strong value proposition for the time and energy it will take to link these tools and processes together into one seamless, kick-butt system.
In Chapter 1, we walked through a customer engagement scenario that was a concatenation of experiences from several past projects. We relived some very painful moments to illustrate a point: Working without some kind of communication infrastructure between engagement personnel and the development organization can be a competitive disadvantage. We’ll even take that one step further by insisting that if you don’t provide tools for rapid problem resolution, you are doing a disservice to your customers.
Follow the logic. Projects go awry—no one will argue that Murphy’s Law lives and breathes in the software development world, probably more so than in just about any other industry. Given that, it should be the goal of your company to optimize the tools and processes for servicing your customers, so that you can spend the majority of your time managing the external influences that impact your projects instead of fighting your own internal processes.
The goal of the first two chapters was to establish the business need for an engagement-to-development communication solution. We’re big believers in making communication from the field back to the home base as simple as possible—but it also has to be two-way. In other words, as important as it is to feed information into the organization, it’s equally important to pull information back out of the organization and provide timely and accurate updates to your customers.
Selling ClearQuest into your own organization follows many of these same business justifications: the need to build lines of communication with your customers, to adopt tools that fit into your existing processes while providing new functionality, and to integrate ClearQuest with other tools within the Rational Suite and with other back-end systems.
During uncertain economic times, everything you do must provide short-term value to the business and the customer base. Even if your company is seeing double-digit growth and record revenue, it’s still important to understand how your tool and process improvements will affect your organization’s ability to serve your internal and external customers. And to understand these impacts, you need to understand the business use cases and value proposition of any project you undertake—especially projects that expand your toolset and impact the way you work.
So, what functionality does ClearQuest provide? For starters, it acts as a buffer to your team and your project, collecting change and enhancement requests from the field and helping your team evaluate and prioritize this information before this data impacts your project. ClearQuest also allows you to manage various request types differently, enabling specialized workflows to handle each. ClearQuest has been referred to as a clearinghouse that collects and filters data, letting you control the effects of that data on your project.
As change requests are entered into the tool—requests that are accepted or rejected and subsequently drive your new system functionality—it is critical to be able to track these change requests, to understand their points of origin, and to provide feedback to the functionality requestor.
Integration is the key to getting the full value out of ClearQuest. Integration between a change request management tool and a configuration management tool, such as ClearCase, is the first step in unleashing the potential of the full Rational suite of tools. Add onto this with a requirements management tool (IBM Rational RequisitePro) and, for example, web-based build-reporting mechanisms, and you’ll be better prepared to track exactly what features were committed and when those features have completed their build cycle. Most importantly, this network of tools allows you to more rapidly deliver against your stakeholder expectations, which will help you ensure that by the time you deliver your product, it still provides value.
There are numerous options for integration, including linking to project management tools, adding a third-party build-reporting tool, or even hooking the system into your customer relationship management system. However, the meat and potatoes of ClearQuest integration are configuration management and requirements management. Here’s a quick overview of the overall value of integrating these tools.
Configuration Management
If you use ClearQuest with ClearCase, you get a single, comprehensive platform for efficient web content and code management. With regard to Unified Change Management (UCM) functionality, ClearQuest gives you scheduled activities, assignment, state, user-defined fields and forms, and roles and security. ClearCase, on the other hand, provides all new objects and UCM infrastructure, projects, components, baselines, change sets, streams, and so forth.
With access to this centralized repository, team members can work on related development activities simultaneously. They can check out parts of the project and work on them in their own private, highly flexible workspaces. Content managers, for example, can either view their work in relation to changes made by other team members or keep it isolated until all changes are complete and checked in. Any changes would be tracked within the system, and notifications would go out to the stakeholders automatically.
The combination of these two tools provides a great advantage to distributed teams, content developers, designers, web developers, and software engineers. They will all have access to the artifacts stored in the Rational ClearCase database, as well as a unified defect- and change-tracking system. How powerful is that?
Requirements Management
[A.3.1] In the beginning, there were requirements. Let’s not forget that so many of our products are created from the ideas of wonderful people—project managers, technical writers, and analysts. In addition to build environments, modern software development tools and practices involve many other types of electronic artifacts: visual models, source code, binaries, documentation, test scripts, images, web content, and, of course, requirements.
Because ClearCase and ClearQuest can be fully integrated with Rational RequisitePro, your team leads can always have a view of the big picture and a clear understanding of what they need to control. Think about the management of your website. Content is constantly being added or changed, and it can be difficult to manage this level of change activity. With RequisitePro integration, you’ll have instant access to precise specifications about what will or will not be in the website, and ClearQuest will update the critical stakeholders automatically whenever a change is made.
[S.3.1] On the question of when to use RequisitePro versus ClearQuest, it really just depends on how your organization uses these tools. RequisitePro is generally used for enhancements only, as more of a strategic tool, while ClearQuest is for day-to-day issue and bug tracking, and feeding those inputs into the development and product teams.
One of the major difficulties within most development organizations can be integration of the applications and business processes of various teams. Tools used by development teams may not connect with the tools in use by the product management team, the support team, and the field services team. What are the primary systems you may want to consider when planning your integrations and making your case to management about the value of ClearQuest and a total change management solution? Here are some heavy hitters.
E-mail
This one is a no-brainer. By adding the built-in facility of e-mail notification, you have the ability to send messages to anyone affected by an event in ClearQuest. When an engagement manager enters an enhancement request from the field into the system, for example, the system can automatically notify the appropriate engineer who is assigned to that feature set of your product. Once that enhancement has been accepted or rejected—or, better yet, once a specific defect has been resolved—the engagement manager is notified immediately, which allows him or her to get right back to that customer. This combination of tools will help your team stay apprised of all significant events in the lifecycle of the defect.
Web-based build-reporting tools, many available through Rational partners and third-party vendors, can also be linked to your e-mail system to provide automated notifications, which will subsequently increase the value of your system.
For those of you unfamiliar with this arena, a good example is Remedy (http://www.bmc.remedy.com). Remedy is a widely used incident management solution, used primarily by help desks, that allows organizations to quickly and effectively respond to end-user or infrastructure events or problems. Remedy offers automated workflows that are designed to respond to end-user requests according to parameters defined by shared service level agreements.
The power of Remedy is in the problem management facilities, which provide root cause analysis of high-impact issues, spanning multiple incidents. This allows support teams to identify when and how errors occur, to see the trends of these issues across time, and to provide direct access to specific solutions or information in a company knowledge database based on the company’s problem resolution workflow.
The disconnect between customer-facing teams and your development team can sometimes be huge. On one side, you have your support desk and field personnel using a product such as Remedy to track incidents; on the other side is your development team using ClearQuest for defect tracking—and there’s no way to track issues across the two systems. A product such as Remedy, in many cases, is your primary support desk application, helping the company track all new user deployments, for example. ClearQuest, on the other hand, will most likely be the primary system used by the internal development organization to track specific product enhancements, defects, and new requirements, with direct integration with your overall configuration management tool, which is most likely ClearCase.
Without integration of these two systems, issues tracked within Remedy have to be reentered into ClearQuest manually. If an issue is one that the development team needs to be aware of, the process relies on someone in the support area entering the issue into both systems; the issue is thus generally tracked by spreadsheet or on handwritten notes, depending on the support representative. And then, once a problem is resolved, there’s no automated method for getting a technical update in ClearQuest back into Remedy so that the customer making the request knows the status. Once again, it’s up to the support person to check the status within ClearQuest and add the update within Remedy, and/or notify the customer directly. On top of it all, product managers—and therefore company executives—have no visibility into the full range of issues and requests coming from the customer. Without this visibility, they will have a difficult time understanding customer usage patterns and knowing where to make changes or upgrades to improve the product they’re building.
Both Remedy and ClearQuest have their benefits and, of course, their target audiences. While some teams may find that ClearQuest alone meets the needs of their entire organization, when ClearQuest is customized through integration with other critical back-end systems, the result is increased management and development team visibility across these systems.
Decision Support Systems
Some companies with a product development focus have created or deployed tools that allow them to better track requirements and product features throughout the development lifecycle. The basic concept here is that seeing the data behind your requirements—which customers are making the requests, how each product feature affects the product line (and company) profit/loss statement, and what can be delivered within specified timelines—helps a company make better decisions about its products and services and better serve the needs of its customer base.
ClearQuest fits in with this category of application, although it may be viewed differently by some organizations depending on their tools and processes. The fact that ClearQuest can be flexibly applied to these systems to fill in the functionality gaps, and also to integrate these tools with the software development team more effectively, provides yet another benefit for deploying this tool.
Many companies suffer from a lack of visibility across organizational boundaries, affecting their ability to quickly capture, prioritize, and respond to industry or customer demands. Understanding the shared artifacts of your key applications—in this example, requirements and enhancement requests—is just the first step in designing an efficient and integrated management solution.
[A.3.2] ClearQuest offers plenty of options for integration, but there isn’t any comprehensive guide to which tools will work best for your own company and within the boundaries of your existing processes. The other concern is that many of your critical applications may not be exactly plug-and-play.
As part of your planning process, you should investigate what has been done before as far as ClearQuest integrations and where you may be breaking some new ground. Most companies do some level of e-mail integration, and you can rest assured that there are plenty of online resources for integrating ClearQuest with ClearCase and other leading software configuration management solutions. But what about your eight-year-old requirements management application that everyone just loves and doesn’t want to give up? What about that new support desk system the company just went over budget on because it was the latest and greatest?
You can start by digging through the IBM developerWorks website (a fantastic resource, we might add) for white papers, manuals, and related articles. The website recommends the manual Installing Rational Suite (also available in an electronic version on the Rational Solutions for Windows Online Documentation CD) and the Rational Suite Release Notes. You can search the support documentation online at http://www.ibm.com/.
As of this writing, Rational is still working to pull together an all-inclusive collection of integration materials (a topic we cover in Chapter 10). While these materials do not focus entirely on ClearQuest, you’ll find some good information on how to get started. Articles such as “Leveraging Points of Integration in Rational Suite: An Introduction” by Brenda Cammarano can be found online through developerWorks. While it’s just an overview of content being developed, her article covers the basic architecture of the Suite integrations.
As Brenda outlines, integrations of ClearQuest with other tools from the Rational Suite can help team members do the following:
Easily transform requirements into test cases and automatically verify functionality
Append test results to bug reports, thereby saving hours of attempts to recreate user errors
Assess the integrity of application architectures early in the project lifecycle
Design and code an application based on system requirements
What is the value of integrating these tools? Well, the advantages are automation and less administration, which will allow you to spend more time developing your products and meeting your customers’ needs. In short, your development team can maximize its productivity while unifying its subteams, and the customer-facing folks can be more responsive.
Just to give you a quick perspective on how the tools are actually linked: It’s all done through the Rational Extensibility Interface. The extensible architecture built around this interface exposes an internal structure that allows the customer to deploy on different computers (or domain servers) within the structure’s network. It provides an opportunity to optimize network traffic as well as access to artifacts. Figure 3-1 shows the logical relationships within this architecture.
Obviously, this diagram doesn’t cover all of the products in the suite, but the way the tools connect through the extensibility interface remains the same.
This architecture also separates the user interface of each tool from the application-server functionality that’s responsible for semantic understanding and persistent storage of the artifacts appropriate to the tool. This structure optimizes each domain server, where a domain server stores and manages data for requirements, visual models, test assets, and change requests within the project. By separating the user interface from server functionality, and then implementing a common Rational Suite Extensibility API across all of these servers, Rational provides a unique and powerful architecture for a project’s artifacts: a single way to access artifacts of all types.
[A.3.3] So, why are we putting all of this focus on understanding how change requests fit into your existing process, and the various integrations available to you? Because you need to have a clear picture of where all of this fits into your organization if you’re going to make a case for adding ClearQuest to the mix. If your management team is technically savvy, it might not be sufficient to present the team with the standard marketing materials available from IBM Rational’s sales team. You’ll probably need to roll out the full-frontal attack with white papers, technical specifications, or maybe even a visit from your local IBM technical sales team. However, for most companies, you’re likely to just need a formal business case, outlining the benefits and the return on investment to your organization. For that, you’ll need to dig into the details and to understand the potential impact of touching each and every one of the various tools and systems used by your development and product teams.
To sell management on ClearQuest, you need a strong business case. The business case is clear: Without the tools in place to translate customer feedback into requirements, requirement priorities into design specifications from product development, and implementation guidelines into finished code by engineering, and then to provide an update for the end user, your company’s communication with your customers and with various internal teams can be chaotic.
The business driver behind ClearQuest is about helping your team decipher the communications between each intervener. That’s the gist of what we’re talking about when we discuss ClearQuest process and tool integration: How can we improve the customer service experience?
We can improve it by bolstering the feedback loops between engagement and development. We can improve it by expanding the communication between requirements and change management. We can improve it by helping management make better decisions on what functionality to build and when.
With all of these business benefits, integrating ClearQuest with the rest of the Rational Suite makes sense.