Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Recently SW Team 1 moved the management of Scrum items (i.e. PBI and SBI)
from TFS into the proprietary Notes database. However, our study shows that it was
beneficial to use a commercial ALM tool (TFS) in both teams a few years ago when
starting to deploy the new working method, Scrum. TFS had a ready process template
for handling Scrum work items and, therefore, it worked as a ready-to-use platform
for experimenting with Scrum in a SW project even though the solution was not op-
timal. This facilitated the deployment of the Scrum method. After successful deploy-
ment it was feasible to start to optimise the solution for the organisation. Now SW
Team 2 uses TFS with the Scrum template for managing Scrum work items, whereas,
SW Team 1 has moved the management of Scrum items into the proprietary Notes
database (feature management DB) that is also used by other platform projects. In
both solutions Scrum items are managed as separate configuration items and can be
associated with each other and, therefore, can be used for automated reporting, etc.
This fine-grained management of configuration items has advantages compared to
file-based management of product information (see e.g. [25, 26]).
5.2 Elaboration of ALM Framework
The documentation of the ALM solution and the collection of improvement ideas
have been facilitated by using an ALM framework that supported the improvement
activities in a company. When comparing the practical implementations of ALM
solutions in a case company and ALM elements in the framework, it was possible to
find relations between the elements (Figure 4). “Creation and management of lifecy-
cle artefacts” is the foundation for ALM. The product information collected and man-
aged by this element is needed, for instance, for traceability and reporting activities.
“Traceability of lifecycle artefacts” provides a means to identify and maintain rela-
tionships between managed lifecycle artefacts and, therefore, facilitates reporting,
change impact analysis and information visibility through the development lifecycle.
“Reporting of lifecycle artefacts” utilises managed lifecycle artefacts and traceability
information to generate needed reports from the lifecycle product information to sup-
port SW development and management. “Communication” provides communication
tools (e.g. chat) as well as channels for distributing information about product lifecy-
cle artefacts, links and reports and thus facilitates product information visibility for
the whole SW project. “Process support” and “Tool integration” are the elements that
are used to configure the ALM solution to support SW development procedures and
to facilitate a productive development environment by enabling the user to easily
launch tools and transfer information between different tools and databases. An ex-
ample in the TFS environment that reflects these relations is the generation of a
“Product backlog composition” -report for Project Portal. The TFS Scrum process
template contains a “Product backlog composition” -report. The report collects man-
aged Scrum items (PBIs, SBIs) as well as their relations to generate a report that pre-
sents PBIs and their related SBIs as well as their realization related information
(hours). This report can then be made visible through a Project Portal that facilitates
the real-time information visibility via a web browser for the whole SW project.
