Be in the knowwwww
You should always be able to answer the famous five Ws.
- 1. What is this item and how does it relate to other items?
- 2. What changed?
- 3. When did it change?
- 4. Who changed it?
- 5. Why did it change?
Have you ever tried to figure out who changed a document, when it happened and why? Or what the document actually is? At times, manual backtracking is even more time-consuming than writing up the document in the first place.
Things can get even more complicated when it comes to the relationship between the documents, and linking a requirement doc to a test case doc just doesn’t cut it. You also need to know if the test was actually carried out, what the results were and which steps were taken.
With Polarion® you can define specific types of work items and the relationship between them, enabling your team to easily build and browse through all items in the process hierarchy — for example, from the user story and test case to bug reporting and fixing, all the way back to the user story. Everything is linked according to (your!) logic and all changes are tracked and time-stamped — which means that staying on top of the five Ws is a breeze.
Meet Alice, Bob, Charlie and Dorothy
These four have a puzzling relationship. While every single one of them knows what their job is, it’s not easy to follow their (digital!) paper trail when they’re in ”maker mode“ and churning out awesome products.
Now, because Alice knows that a pile of documents makes a lousy puzzle, she defines different types of work items. She also controls how and by whom specific items can be linked. And she can even make things happen automagically depending on how an item is actioned.
Sure, it’s still a puzzle, but it’s a nice one you want to do over and over.
And in case you were wondering: Alice is the (nice but gets-things-done) boss, Bob is the (seasoned) designer, Charlie is the requirements engineer (always looking sharp) and Dorothy is the (uncompromising yet friendly) QA manager.
Agility through improved collaboration
Spansion (now Cypress Semiconductors) reduced 80% of time to manage traceability. Before Polarion® the process was based on Excel and Word.