Tool Mentor: Plan a Project with Rational Team Concert (RTC)
This tool mentor describes how to plan your project using Rational Team Concert (RTC) work items.
Tool: Rational Team Concert (RTC)
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Main Description

Prerequisites

Read the following documents: 

This tool mentor assumes that the project area have been created and some work items have been created during the activity.

The following steps are covered in this tool mentor:

  • Determine project size and scope
  • Evaluate risks
  • Define iteration length
  • Outline project lifecycle

Determine Project Size and Scope

The following steps in RTC can help you with determining your project size.

  1. List work items: you can list the work items by running work items query

    1. In the Team Artifacts View, right click on Work Item folder -> New -> Query.
    2. Use the Work Item Query editor to create a query that retrieves work items were the status is Open and click Run.
    3. All work items which are in the Open state will be listed in the Work Items View.
       
  2. For each work item, produce a rough effort estimate using Agile Estimation. Enter the actual estimation effort into the work items by following these steps.

    1. Double click on a work item in the Work Items View. This will bring up the Work Item Editor.
    2. Enter the estimation effort in the Estimate field.

Evaluate Risks

Creating New Risk Items

Risk item is defined as a work item type with special workflow and attributes in process template. You You can document risks and track them using RTC's work item capabilities. Whenever the team identifies a project risk, you can capture it by creating a new Work Item and selecting "Risk" for its type. (For more details on creating work items see in https://jazz.net/learn/LearnItem.jsp?href=content/docs/work-items/index.html.) Assign a severity associated with the risk in the severity field as well as document the Risk's Probability and Impact.

Identify Tasks to Mitigate Risks

If you wish to account for additional effort to mitigate risks, instead of treating risk mitigation as an overhead, you can create specific tasks for risk mitigation and include an effort estimate. There are two ways to create task for risk mitigation: extract tasks from risk description or link work items to a risk.

Extract Tasks
  1. In the Work Item Editor's Description field, enter a summary description of the tasks that you plan to be performed in order to mitigate the risk.
  2. For each of these tasks in the description field, highlight the task summary description and right-click and select Extract Work Item.
  3. The new work item will be created and automatically linked to this risk.
Link Tasks to a Risk Item
  1. Create a new work item: you can create a new work item by following these steps:

    1. In the Team Artifacts View, Right-click on Work Item folder -> New -> Work Item
       
    2. Select the Work Item Type Task in the Create New Work Item dialog.
    3. Click Finish.
    4. Enter the work item's name in the Summary field.
       
    5. Provide the details for this task such as work item Category, Severity, Priority, Effort estimation.
    6. Cick Save or Ctrl+S.
  2. Click on the Links tab of the Work Item Editor.
  3. In the Links section, click Add.
  4. Select Add Related IconAdd Related... as the relationship type to be used between a task and a risk item. Then, select the risk item to which you want to relate the task to. The link between this task and selected risk item will be created and displayed in the Quick Information section in the overview tab. This will allow you to trace between tasks and risk items easily by clicking on these entries.

Define iteration length

The process template contains a development-line specification for Project Lifecycle. You can add an Iteration to project lifecycle using the Project Area Editor. By default, the Jazz process component assumes an iteration length of 4 weeks. To change this refer to details in the Create a new Process Template tool mentor.

To learn how to modify process iterations templates in general see https://jazz.net/learn/content/docs/process/#Process_Concepts.

Outline items to be delivered in each iteration

We recommend capturing high level goals for each iteration in the project plan. These high level goals are typically not captured as work items. However, to get started with identifying such goals you could consider reviewing the existing open work items and risks.

  1. List the Open work items by running the Work Item Query (see the details on how to run this query above). 
  2. Starting from top priority work items (including tasks related to the high severity risks), identify the features to implement and allocate them to iterations (or iteration goals) as well as document them in the Project Plan.

The result is a high-level plan outlining how the team can build the resulting application in the given set of iterations.

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