Change management and defect tracking involves resolving unique issues that arise due to the broad scope of the development projects. Change often requires input from several departments, and no changes can be implemented until a solution is approved by all responsible individuals. Frequently, a defect or change review committee exists to manage this process and to ensure that the appropriate individuals participate in each decision.
QualityTEAM helps organizations effectively manage this environment through task assignments. Initially, you can define a list of tasks for each defect. Such tasks might include assigning the defect to an engineer, determining the cost of fixing the defect or approving the defect resolution.
QualityTEAM automatically notifies the appropriate individuals that they must respond to an action associated with a defect. This ensures that all required approvals and tasks are completed before the defect status can be closed.
Managing the product change process requires automated solutions.
Systems for software defect management must also be based on the continuous process improvement principals that are fundamental to Total Quality Management. These solutions should be designed to adapt to the organizationÕs processes rather than requiring processes to change to fit the tool. Additionally, defect management applications should be integrated with third party tools for configuration management and testing to eliminate the gaps that currently exist between these islands of automation.
The tools that facilitate these interactions should provide automatic defect notification to responsible personnel, including remote sites, and offer integration capabilities across widespread a preventative maintenance service that minimizes the resources necessary for defect resolution and maximizes software development productivity.
QualityTEAM is a client/server-based defect tracking and change management system designed specifically for development engineers, quality assurance engineers and others who participate in the product change process. Each change of status activates an automated response. Technical support, Customer Service, QA, and other users initiate the change management process when they identify problems or the need for new functionality. The defect resolution process can be decomposed into a series of sub-defects with resources assigned at each level. When defect resolution involves approvals from multiple individuals, QualityTEAM lets you modify the process so no changes are implemented without proper approval. Additionally, QualityTEAM improves information flow between departments involved in the change management process through automatic defect generation and reporting, and support for remote sites. These capabilities enable organizations to implement distributed and complex project management strategies. QualityTEAM can be easily customized, allowing companies to establish and enforce their own processes for accepting, assigning, tracking, fixing, and closing defects based on their corporate standards. The benefits of tracking defects:
QualityTEAM can be integrated with the SupportTEAM module to ensure that customers receive prompt accurate status on reported problems, therefore increasing customer satisfaction. New feature requests or product enhancements that can be captured in customer support are shared automatically with development and product teams, helping to ensure that products meet real customer needs.
These applications can also be integrated with third party tools. For example, Scopus integrates with a wide variety of tools for configuration management and testing (e.g., Atria's ClearCase, Intersolv's PVCS, and Mercury Interactive's XRunner). The unique combination of this best-of-class technology along with extensive defect and process management experience has made Scopus the leading vendor of workflow automation solutions for change process management.