Polarion Software Weblog

On February 1, 2008 Polarion Software will launch our Subversion and ALM workshops in the United Kingdom (more below). Those customers and friends who started out with one of these workshops in Germany or elsewhere – now is your chance to pass along a juicy tidbit of news to your British colleagues and contacts (and we’ll appreciate it very much if you will!)

The first round is in London, and will be run by Ian Forsythe, who heads up our new U.K. division Polarion Software UK Ltd. Ian reports that the SVN workshop is almost full, so don’t wait to sign up for that one. (If you miss it, don’t worry. Ian plans to run the workshops every 6 weeks or so. Stay tuned here or to the RSS feed for announcements.)

Details and sign-up for the SVN workshop are on our site at: www.polarion.com/company/events/subv_workshop_en.php.

Same info for the ALM workshop is at:
www.polarion.com/company/events/alm_workshop_uk.php.

Cost of each workshop is £79 GBP per person. Hope to see you in London for this one, or at one of the future events in the U.K.

The slots for our series of free personalized online ALM demos are filling up fast – as of today almost half of our capacity is already booked solid! Although we will probably schedule more such sessions in the future, if you or someone you know would like to take advantage of the sessions we have scheduled now, don’t delay signing up.

Available dates/times, plus a sign-up form are on the web at www.polarion.com/products/alm/demo_registration.php

Thanks to all readers who have helped spread the word!

Through March, 2008 Polarion Software is offering a series of free personal online demos of Polarion ALM 3.0.

If you already use Polarion ALM, you probably don’t need to participate in these, but we would certainly appreciate you passing the word along to colleagues or contacts who might be interested. We should stress that these demos are personal and 2-way: only the registrant and anyone he/she chooses to have sit in will be present in the approximately 45-minute session, and participants will have the opportunity to discuss their own situations with a member of the Polarion Professional Services team, and ask questions.

Available dates/times, plus a sign-up form are on the web at www.polarion.com/products/alm/demo_registration.php

Sometimes people ask me how it is possible to track status of items that have been refined by subitems. Imagine having a change request that has been broken down into several tasks. In the following blog I want to take a deeper look on how parent items can be tracked even if they have been refined into subitems.

Where Planning Information is Visible

Each workitem in Polarion contains a field that represents automatically calculated planning information. This field is called planned to. It contains the start and end date to which a workitem was scheduled by Polarion during the latest planning round (update of liveplan). The planned to field is not editable and it will only be updated if the workitem is considered as an element that must be planned (please refer to the planning.xml file for more information).

As soon as Polarion has finished a planning round you will see a start and end date inside the planned to field.

How is the planned to field calculated ?

Please have a look at the other blogs on planning and linking to get a better understanding of Polarion’s planning algorithm. Today we want to analyze the parent/child relationship in more detail. Let’s take following scenario:

Our project has received a change request (EDEMO-1: “Text should be easier to read”) which has as remaining estimate of 10 days and was scheduled to timepoint Rel-1.

After a while our change request has been refined by two subtasks (EDEMO-2: “Increase text size” and EDEMO-3: “Increase contrast and color (black and white)” ) EDEMO-2 has remaining estimate of 6 days and EDEMO-3 has a remaining estimate of 7 days

Parent Items are not Visualized in Liveplan

As a matter of fact we have created a little conflict here. The child items have in sum a different estimate compared to the parent item – 13 days for the child tasks compared to 10 days initially planned for the change request. Polarion’s liveplan will manage such conflicts in following way. Parent items will be removed from liveplan when they have child items. Only child items will be visible. The reason is that remaining time estimates on child items are considered more accurate as estimates on parent items.

How Planning Information is Delegated to Parent Items

So how can we track our change request when it is not anymore displayed in liveplan and how is the conflict resolved?

Even if parent items are not visible in liveplan the planned to field is updated correctly. After Polarion’s next planning round the liveplan will contain a range of 13 days (EDEMO-2 + EDEMO-3) instead of 10 days. Polarion sums up remaining estimates of all child items and presents the result inside the planned to field of the parent item

Where Can I See Planning Information of Parent Items

If you want to see if parent items are delayed you can switch to one of the following views:

• table view,
• tree view or
• roadmap view.

You should make sure that the timePoint, plannedStart and plannedEnd columns are displayed. If an item is delayed it will be marked in red. If you want to check why an item is delayed you can change to tree view and analyze state and estimations of the child items. In our example the 13 days for change request EDEMO-1 is too long and timepoint Rel-1 can not be reached. Additionally we see that task EDEMO-2 can not be finished in time.

Best Wishes
Tim