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Welcome to ClearDDTS
This chapter provides a brief overview of ClearDDTS
and the kinds of problems that ClearDDTS can help your organization solve.
Topics covered include:
What is ClearDDTS?
ClearDDTS is a change request management system
that tracks and organizes product feedback for development and testing
organizations. ClearDDTS provides a range of meaningful metrics to help
you measure product and process quality and is tightly integrated with
software configuration management systems to help you effectively manage
change.
Developed through real-world experience and
use, ClearDDTS is specifically designed to track and manage change requests,
such as product defect reports and enhancement requests. However, ClearDDTS
is also flexible enough to be adapted to track almost any other type of
information.
ClearDDTS features include:
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An intuitive web-based interface, which allows easy submission of, and
access to, change request information through a web browser from virtually
any platform.
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Scalable change request tracking facilities that work equally well for
small projects and large development organizations, and can be completely
customized to suit your needs.
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Extensive search and query capabilities, which allow you to look up and
examine records based on any criteria.
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Reporting and analysis tools which allow you to track trends and evaluate
product stability and overall quality.
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Fully distributed information management. Users can submit change requests
from anywhere. As many people as desired, at any location, can subscribe
and be updated on any individual project's change request status.
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Integration with software configuration management systems to manage change
and the reasons for change.
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Integration with other development and testing tools to provide the backbone
for a Quality Information System.
Using ClearDDTS to manage change requests
In today's competitive markets, software quality and
engineering productivity are crucial to a company's success. Effectively
tracking defect reports and enhancement requests leads to better quality
product releases and a competitive advantage. Without a change request
management system, defect reports are lost or never submitted, bugs continue
to plague products, and customers are dissatisfied. Without a change request
management system, enhancement requests and innovative product ideas get
lost, never get to the engineer, and are never put into the product.
These problems are further compounded when
software is developed by teams located in different buildings or in different
states or countries.
ClearDDTS provides an easy to use interface
and a feedback loop to encourage the submission of change requests. Submitters
and others interested in the change request are notified of status changes.
Once the change request is submitted, the information can be easily retrieved
and organized in reports and graphs.
ClearDDTS allows everyone in the organization
to be more productive. Depending on your role, you can focus on just the
information or tasks in which you are interested or can view information
in different ways. For example:
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Engineers can view all approved change requests for which they are responsible,
all change requests in the project, all outstanding change requests, or
only change requests submitted in the last week. You define the information
you want to see.
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Project managers can generate a variety of reports that provide information
about project status and product quality in a format suitable for presentation
to upper-level management.
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QA managers can view change requests in all projects and give company-wide
quality reports and metrics.
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Management can access corporate-wide quality reports to compare projects
and make resource and product shipment decisions based on "hard data."
Moving beyond change request management
ClearDDTS is a very effective way to manage change
requests. In many organizations, there is also a need for an integrated
approach to configuration management (CM) and change request management
(CRM) to provide more complete change control.
The integration of a software configuration management
system such as ClearCase, or a version control system such as RCS, with
a CRM system like ClearDDTS provides your organization with a formal change
management system.
Change management allows you to track the reasons
for changes (for example, bugs and enhancement requests), your status responding
to those requests (for example, which bugs have been fixed and which enhancements
implemented), and which releases contain which changes (for example, the
changes that are incorporated into release 2.1 but not 2.0).
ClearDDTS provides this integration by saving information
about CM activity as files are checked out and checked in and through scripts
that can be customized to handle communication with your CM system.
If you want to know more about the integration
of configuration management and CRM, see the ClearDDTS Administrator's
Guide. If you are using ClearCase and want to know specific information
about how ClearCase and ClearDDTS provide an integrated solution, see the
ClearCase ClearDDTS Integration guide as well as the ClearDDTS
Administrator's Guide.
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