Ok, admit it: You know you need Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), but haven't quite figured out how to implement it. In all honesty, there are many paths to take. You could do nothing, and suffer the consequences. You could buy into an "end-to-end" ALM solution, and deal with the extra cost and complexity they bring, or you could take a serious look at how Rational ClearQuest can meet your ALM needs.
ALM with ClearQuest?
Quick question, what solution acts as a hub around which all other development activity revolves? No, not your requirements management system (if you have one). A requirements tool serves primarily to capture the inputs into your development process. And not your source code control system either. As useful as they are, your version control system mostly captures the outputs of the development process. When it comes down to it, the controller of work in your organization is typically a change management solution such as Rational ClearQuest. Team members turn to this tool daily to figure out what to do next.
If you're already using Rational ClearQuest, it's time to open your mind to the new possibilities enabled by Rational ClearQuest v7.1. If you are still on the fence regarding Rational ClearQuest adoption, then consider the fact that this powerful tool can do a whole lot more than just manage defects.
Say Hello to CQ ALM
ALM is all about the lifecycle management of artifacts and their relationships. Artifacts produced by coordinated development to produce software applications. An ALM solution should be agile, flexible, rapidly deployable, and most importantly include the ability to trace the flow of artifacts and work through your organization.
All of this is now possible with Rational ClearQuest v7.1. IBM has taken its change management solution to new levels. And the great thing is that you can easily unlock Rational ClearQuest's ALM capabilities for a streamlined, agile application development process that is both role-based and process-driven. The ALM features are delivered with Rational ClearQuest v7.1 (and the ALM packages can also be applied to Rational ClearQuest v7.0.1).
Collaborate Efficiently
Artifacts related to disciplines like source code development, requirements specification or test case creation are important: equally important are the resulting collaborations between the practitioners of these disciplines. To enable this, the Rational ClearQuest ALM schema is based on three essential concepts:
In the ALM schema, projects define user access and role-based actions, which work types will be used by the project team, and whether the work will be managed in phases and iterations. Projects can have relationships to other projects to organize work effort. Parent/child relationships can be used to group projects that are related in a single, larger effort. And next/previous relationships can be used to identify related projects over time.
Work is managed in the context of a project, and it can be assigned to team members who are either co-located or distributed. Work records keep track of the requests, tasks and activities that the team needs to address during the development cycle.
All work begins with some form of request. This request describes the identified need and is owned by the stakeholder. Tasks represent the commitment to address the request in a specific project and describe the work required to complete the request. Activities are assignments to individuals that, when completed cumulatively, complete the task. In addition, build and baseline records help the team keep track of the status of each build along with which activities are delivered in the baselines. By linking activities to baselines, test teams can determine which tests to run on each new build.
All of these records are linked, pioneering a new level of traceability and transparency. You can see how much work is required with each request; what projects are involved; how much of the work is completed; and the status of work still in process.
Simple Deployment
The ALM schema is designed and built for rapid implementation. It provides a majority of the functionality needed by most teams, and it captures ALM best practices that can cut deployment time by 50 percent or more. These best practices can be used as is or extended and applied to existing and new Rational ClearQuest implementations. The support for projects, security policies and roles gives administrators a framework that they can extend, without having to create and maintain it themselves. Because Rational ClearQuest ALM is provided as a set of packages (in addition to a schema), you can apply the packages to an existing Rational ClearQuest database and begin enjoying the benefits without impacting your users.
It's Not Just for Bugs Anymore
It should be clear by now that Rational ClearQuest operates on a whole different plane—it offers so much more than competing change management solutions. This is a seriously capable solution that allows you to track work items as they progress through the application development workflow. There is a lot of business value in doing more than just bug tracking with Rational ClearQuest. If you looked at Rational ClearQuest in the past, then look again. If you're an existing Rational ClearQuest user, version 7.1 is definitely worth an upgrade.
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