One of the most common complaints about most applications—and ClearQuest is no exception—is that the standard documentation does not provide adequate guidance and best practices for deployment. Even when you find deployment and integration guidelines, they often lack some of the business reasoning behind them to help you reinforce the importance of the new or expanded application to your management team. And, in most cases, they fail to take into account how the new application fits into, or affects, the other tools in the change management continuum.
With flexibility comes complexity, and what is needed is a plan for continuous fine-tuning. Your systems will change, your back-end requirements may shift depending on your partners and vendors, but your change control systems should be able to manage these changes.
Your change management system is the glue that binds your engineering, testing, manufacturing, and product development organizations, intrinsically tying them to your customers. This is the medium through which process is enforced and communication tracked. Part of your planning should establish a continual change management process and tool assessment to ensure that your users’ needs are being met and that the system is updated as new products and add-ons are released. We know it sounds like a no-brainer, but if you don’t plan for system optimization, it usually doesn’t happen—until something breaks.
The primary value of an application such as ClearQuest is to improve communication across the organization—between product and development teams, between production and support, and between company and customer. No more endless volleying between product management and engineering and engagement personnel to clarify exactly what the customer wants and needs and what the development team can deliver; in combination with ClearCase and other tools in the IBM Rational Suite, ClearQuest is the communication vehicle for your change management system.
And you are the change agent making it all possible—whether you’re the company’s official change management manager or just a part of the change management team trying to understand how ClearQuest fits into the picture. Integration of ClearQuest into your company’s hodgepodge of different development, test, change management, and project management tools doesn’t just happen on its own. It requires formal analysis, design, and implementation cycles to identify and validate the benefits, and several change agents from throughout the organization to ensure that it’s done properly and with input from all the potential user organizations. Far too many change management systems are grown organically over time; the result is fragile, rigid systems in constant need of upgrades and repair. While these systems create job security for some engineers, they often become management nightmares.
Now that you have a better understanding of where ClearQuest fits into the change management continuum and how to deploy it properly, the key is to plan your implementation thoroughly. As you undertake this project, make sure you have the proper support from management and input from the relevant teams to accomplish your task. Change management systems are probably among the more difficult solutions to develop and deploy. You are tasked with integrating several systems that need to act as one system. Your solution must be highly reliable, and your deployment cannot affect the current development cycle. So make sure you do your homework.
[A.13.1] If you’re also looking to roll out IBM Rational’s ClearCase as part of your software configuration management solution, we recommend that you look at our book The Art of ClearCase® Deployment (Addison-Wesley, 2004). As with this book, we cover the entire solution space around the application, not just the technical aspects.
Our other book follows some of the same technical footsteps you’ll find in your product documentation, but as with this book, it provides the material in a way that a broader group of project personnel can use. Our goal with both of these books was to provide members of the extended project team—and burgeoning change management managers—with a better understanding of how an end-to-end change management solution, in general, can enhance an organization’s ability to deliver better products, faster.
Whether you have questions about specific functionality or you want to prepare yourself for some custom work on your ClearQuest install, your options online are constantly growing. IBM Rational provides a wealth of content through the developerWorks site. A number of vendors and partners also offer specific answers.
While not every site we include here has the stamp of approval from IBM Rational, it’s always good to see what other project teams are doing and what the various add-on vendors are selling. Here are some recommended websites at which you might begin your research.
http://www-136.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/ This is the main IBM Rational website, providing links to online technical documentation, downloads, online seminars, and many other valuable tools and links.
http://www.cmcrossroads.com CM Crossroads is the configuration management community online, with articles, product reviews and comparisons, web casts, and discussion forums. If you want to share your experiences with the community at large or want to find out about other efforts to integrate ClearQuest with a variety of applications, this is the place to start your research.
http://www.rational-ug.org/ The Rational Software Global User Group Community website provides access to independent, user-run groups around the world where you can exchange information with other users and IBM Rational staff in live or virtual meetings.
http://www-136.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/community Of course, the IBM Rational website provides links to relevant content and groups for each of its products.
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/support/assistance.html This is the IBM Rational Help page. It provides an overview of the various support documents available on the website and within the technical support knowledge base. It also includes site tours, helping you to better learn how to navigate the expansive website.
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/support/help.html Finally, if you discover you have a technical problem that cannot be resolved without IBM Rational’s help (or heavenly intervention), you’ll need to become acquainted with IBM’s Electronic Service Request (ESR) problem submission tool. The ESR helps you through the process of reporting issues, ensuring that all of the proper fields and descriptions during the creation or update of your Problem Management Records (PMRs) are filled out to the best of your ability.