Guideline: Solution: Improve Lifecycle Collaboration
Improve collaboration by providing lifecycle integration across otherwise disconnected team members.
Main Description

Solution Description

Collaborative Systems & Embedded Software lifecycle management includes the following:

  • Coordinating the activities in the systems & embedded software development lifecycle through enablement of practices.
  • Enabling linking and traceability across the artifacts used or produced by team members.
  • Enabling and support processes that span these activities.
  • Enabling approvals on critical areas including reviews and verification (Checking).
  • Reporting on progress of the whole team.

Symptoms

The following symptoms indicate a need for improvement in lifecycle collaboration:

  • Lack of common ways of working practices.
  • Difficulty for inexperience participants to quickly deliver their contribution.
  • Too much time spent agree what to do.
  • High inconsistency among deliverables.
  • Too much time spent on preparing and updating status report.
  • Team spends a lot of time in status meetings or trying to figure out what needs to be done.
  • Team members insist on formal hand-off rather than early and progressive contribution.
  • Senior SMEs become a bottleneck on multiple projects and initiatives.

Tools

  • IBM® Rational® Team Concert® (including RTCi and RTCz)
  • IBM® Rational® DOORS
  • IBM® Rational® Rhapsody

With support from:

  • IBM® Rational® Requirements Composer®
  • IBM® Rational® Quality Manager®
  • IBM® Rational® Insight®

Practices

Practice measures

  • Requirements Churn
    • The rate of change of requirements over a period of observation
    • e.g. 40 during a 4 week phase = 10/week
    • Note: RTC reports can show the number and rate of changes arising from groups of requirements changes in DOORS
  • High-Level Requirement Stability (Stakeholder Requirement (In)stability)
    • The rate of change of stakeholder requirements over a period of observation
    • e.g. 8 during a 4 week phase = 2/week
    • Note: RTC reports can show the number and rate of changes arising from groups of requirements changes in DOORS
  • Requirement Traceability Coverage
    • The traceability and assessed coverage of System requirements of Stakeholder Requirements
    • E.g. 90% coverage
    • E.g 5 uncovered Stakeholder requirements
    • Note: RTC WI and reports can show the cases where exceptions are raised to solve significant traceability issues arising from review

Solution Benefits by business objective     

  • The primary focus is to reduce Engineering cost by:
    • Improving team productivity (Improved project management, leveraging remote staff, improved team utilization)
    • Improving team collaboration (transparent knowledge sharing, improved task coordination between team members, seamless transfer of work)
    • Improving project governance (automated process management, enforcement of best practices, alignment of quality/risk with lifecycle stages)
    • Reduce communication and reporting overhead
    • Management can reassign resource more accuratel and earlier
  • The secondary focus is to Improve Quality:
    • Reduced customer issues (link work to requirements, incremental customer deliverables and feedback)
    • Reduced build issues (continuous integration and testing, traceability to work items)
    • Reduced risk of project failures (agile planning, iterative development, continuous integration and testing, transparency)
    • Reduce number of defects