Purpose
  • Change activity is a powerful indicator of project status and trends. The purpose of this process step is for the Project Manager to define what product related change data is to be reported, by whom and at what frequency.
Topics:
Tool Mentor:  Viewing the History of a Defect

Concepts: Configuration Status Reporting describe the various sources for creating Configuration Status Reports.

Select Change Request Based Reports To top of page

Purpose
  • To select reports that can be derived from the Change Requests submitted to the project.

There are a number of useful Change Request based reports.

Under the ‘aging’ category, reporting could be requested in terms of the number of Change Requests over time periods of a week or month based on the following criteria:

  • Submitted,
  • Assigned,
  • Resolved, and
  • Priority.

Listing problems by state can help determine how close to completion the project might be. For example, if the bulk of the problems have been resolved then completion is closer than if the bulk of the problems are in the submitted state.

Under the ‘distribution’ category, reporting could be requested to answer the following types of questions:

  • Who is finding, what kind of defects, at what point in the project?
  • Who are the problems being assigned to?
  • How many problems are open under a given engineer?
  • How severe are the defects that are being found?
  • Where in the process are the problems being caused (root cause)?
  • When are the problems getting fixed?
  • How many defects are there?
  • How severe are these defects?

These metrics can help in the analysis of work load, who is working on the most critical problems, and how quickly the problems are being closed.

Under the ‘trend’ category, reports could be requested to answer the following types of questions:

  • How many defects are open this day, week or month?
  • How many defects have been closed this day, week or month?

This data is useful assessing repair rates and could provide indications of engineering efficiency.

Define Reporting Frequency To top of page

Purpose
  • To ensure that reports are received at the right frequency to be provide meaningful input for decision making.

Reports could be requested on the following basis:

  • Daily – it is unlikely that reports would be required at this frequency.
  • Weekly - Trend, Distribution and Count Reports, Build Reports.
  • Monthly - Trend, Distribution and Count Reports, Build Reports.
  • By Iteration - Trend, Distribution and Count Reports, Build Reports, Version Descriptions.
  • By Phase - Trend, Distribution and Count Reports, Audits, Build Reports, Version Descriptions.
  • At Project-End - Trend, Distribution and Count Reports, Audits, Build Reports, Version Descriptions.

 

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© Rational Software Corporation 1998 Rational Unified Process 5.1 (build 43)