This chapter focuses on the Asset Lifecycle Management and workflow features of OER. The chapter elaborates further on the same requirements listed in Chapter 4, Initial Configuration, use case, however, it focuses on how design-time tools can be used in conjunction with a process and people to achieve the right level of governance.
Weir & Bell Telecom acknowledge that without some sort of enforcement of the defined standards and policies, it would be only a matter of time before things get out of control and governance becomes an issue again. To prevent this situation the architects at Weir and Bell came up with a target design-time Governance model:
The model implies an Asset-centric Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) whereby OER would be used to:
- Register all Assets created by the different actors throughout the lifecycles
- Once requirements have been captured, define a Bill of Materials that can be used later on by designers and developers to understand the scope of the requirements and the artifacts that need delivering
- Introduce human workflow for approvals either by individuals or groups
- Enforce design-time quality gates throughout the different stages of the Software Development Lifecycle
The subsequent sections describe how a gap analysis was done in order to understand what customizations were needed in the out of the box OER functionality and also how these customizations were implemented.