Polarion Software Weblog

In this blog I would like to finish the discussion on fields that have an impact on how items are planned in Polarion’s liveplan.
So let’s have a look at the fields we have not covered yet.

Due Date

The due date field represents the same idea as a timepoint. Due dates can be set additionally to or instead of a timepoint. Setting a due date to an item will highlight the item with a red border in the liveplan once it has slipped over the due date. You can use due dates to control important items within your plan. Maybe all items have to be finished at the end of iteration 1 but some items - those that you consider as critical - should be finished at an earlier date.

Planning Constraint

If you set a planning constraint to an item it will always be planned according to the constraint you have set - independently of its priority or dependencies to other items. That means if you set a planning constraint you should know what you do as you overrule Polarion’s planning algorithm.

In the following example “Feature 1” depends on “Feature 2”. We have set a planning constraint for “Feature 1”. It must start on 15^th of August. The planning algorythm has been overruled and the item is planned to the ^15th of August. The existing dependency to “Feature 2” is ignored.

So use planning constraints with care. In some situation however planning constraints come quite handy. For example defining holidays or adding fixed events to the plan (exhibition, fair…)

Time Spent/Work Record

This field has only indirect impact on our plan as it updates the “remaining estimate” field. Whenever somebody enters some value either in the time spent field or as a work record the remaining estimate will be reduced by the entered value.

If you want to benefit of the advanced time reporting features of polarion you should use work records instead of time spent field. Work records are user specific compared to time spent which is an anonymous entry.

Planned To

I added this field only for completeness as it can not be changed by the user. The “planned to” field displays the result of Polarion’s replanning. Whenever the liveplan is updated Polarion changes the content of the field to the updated time frame to which the item was scheduled. If you want to visualize this field in the table you have to add “plannedStart” and “plannedEnd” as columns.

Resolution

The resolution field has a simple but important impact on the plan. By default only unresolved items are displayed in the plan. Whenever you resolve an item it will disappear from your plan.

Best Wishes
Tim

One problem of many plans is that they become outdated as soon as you are confronted with changes inside your project. What I like about Polarion is that you can embrace change. Change happens and change is good. Better to adjust the product and face the impact of changes than delivering the wrong product. The main difference to the initial planning process is that we have already an existing plan into which we have to squeeze in new features, bugs and change requests.

In our example we have a simple three step process:

1. Change request/bug arrives and is reviewed
2. Analyze impact, estimate, prioritize and assign
3. Reschedule according to new situation

Change request/bug arrives and is reviewed

As long as the change request has no assignee it will appear at the bottom of the plan. We could interpret the bottom bar as a representation of the project’s backlog à all open issues qued one after another

Analyze impact, estimate, prioritize and assign

We analyze the impact and decide to implement the change. This step requires to set an assignee, priority, estimate and a timepoint to define when the change should be implemented. If it is a bug that has to be implemented at once we give it highest priority.

This information will be enough for polarion to update the plan - now including the new bug. According to the priorities we have set it will appear as first item to be implemented. Unfortunately this has an impact on our plan. We see that some of the features (marked in red) will be delayed.

Reschedule according to new situation

Now it is time to adjust our plan according to the new situation. We may react in two ways. One possibility is to move the milestones that are affected.

The other option we have is to keep our milestone but reassign some other items that won’t make to the milestone because of the unexpected bugfix.

Managing changes in your project will happen quite regularily. But as you can see above it is not complex. The important thing is that you have to keep control on the impact of a change. The liveplan of polarion will help you to control your changes as you will get an up-to-date information on what is going on in your project.

Best Wishes
Tim

This new feature of Polarion 2.6.5 lets users to store important process information: the dates when work items change their workflow status. This information is always available in Polarion, but now we have the opportunity to easily use this data.

For example Polarion users can export status change dates to MS Word documents to highlight the evidence, important for quality processes, of the acceptance of work items (i.e. Requirement or Problem Report). Or we can export such information in MS Excel sheets and use it to audit/measure the time performances of some activities (i.e. how much time elapsed between creating a bug and fixing it).

How it works

The status change dates will be stored in specific custom field(s) of each individual item. So, first of all we have to define the custom fields where we would have dates stored.

For example, we are working on Defect item type and we would like to store the resolution dates.

Custom field definition:

Administration perspective: [select project] : Work Items > Custom Fields topic

Download the defect-custom-fields.xml file and add the following element:

<field id="resolutionDate"
type="date-time”
name=”Resolution Date”
description=”"/>

Upload the modified configuration file back to Polarion. Then we can go on to define the workflow for the Defect item type

Workflow definition:

Using the Web Interface in the Administration Perspective choose topic Work Items/Workflow and create a new workflow definition specific for the Defect Work Item Type (click Create in the Actions column).

Find the Actions table and for action to resolve click on the icon in the last column on right side (labeled Actions).

Now we should have a new pop-up dialog like this one:

In the Function dropdown menu select the FieldValueChange option and click the plus icon and then the again.
Now we have the Parameters dialog where we have to specify following values:

So after closing the two dialogs and saving changes on the main workflow design page we should have the new workflow definition configuration file defect-workflow.xml

Here the fragment of the file with the new function defined:

    <functions>
        <function name="FieldValueChange">
            <param name="field.name" value="resolutionDate"/>
            <param name="field.value.type" value="current.date"/>
        </function>
    </functions>

Now clear the system caches (Administration : Repository, Topic: System > Caches ) and go to try the result of your work!

Note that this new feature is a nice and generic function that we can find implemented out of the box; now, in Polarion 2.6.5, you can also design and implement your own custom functions that could be invoked during workflow transitions!

Custom code invocation in workflow transitions is a very advanced topic, and if you like, we will write some notes on that here on this blog!

In this part of the article we have seen how to record workflow status changes, in the second part we will show how to use these data. Stay tuned.