Database Reference
In-Depth Information
The Team Development entities are contained within a single workspace. When
you're managing several applications simultaneously within a workspace, you and your
teams can easily filter Team Development's data by using the tool's interactive reports.
That way, each stakeholder sees only the work that is of immediate interest for the
tasks at hand.
Features
describe the big picture. At a high level, they describe and track progress
for the major pieces of functionality that your client has requested. Attributes like own-
er, start date, due date, summary description, priority, status, and so on are easily
tracked. In addition, you can optionally track the status of individual components such
as the user interface, testing, documentation, globalization, security, and accessibility.
The self-join that is associated with features allows you to further subdivide a feature
into child features as development progresses and the design becomes more refined.
The high-level nature of features makes them an ideal source for management status re-
ports.
Milestones
are the high-level scheduling component of Team Development. They
can be used to track major and minor releases of an application. Don't confuse mile-
stones with the due dates that are associated with features and to-dos. For example, a
milestone could be the scheduled date for a product release, but a feature that is in-
cluded in the release might be due well in advance of the milestone date. If you use an
agile software-development strategy, milestones are well suited to define the time
boxes or sprints.
To-dos
are used to assign detailed work to individuals or teams. Due dates, time es-
timates, and so on are tracked. Like features, to-dos have a self-join capability that al-
lows you to subdivide them as more information becomes known during the develop-
ment process. This is handy when a single to-do requires effort from more than one
team.
When a defect is found, it's reported as a bug.
Bugs
have their own lifecycle that in-
cludes a rich set of attributes such as description, resolution, release, assignee, context,
and date information. When you find a bug that turns out to be a design flaw, Team
Development allows you to link the bug to multiple features, milestones, and to-dos,
because the bug fix might require an extended time that spans a number of product re-
leases.
Feedback
is one of the main sweet spots of Team Development. The feedback
mechanism can be installed in an application in a matter of minutes and gives the entire
team an efficient and elegant communication channel for comments, suggestions, is-
sues, defect reports, and responses. Once installed in an application, the feedback
mechanism is promoted with the application from the development environment to the
test environment and on to the production environment. Feedback data and the related
