I have been reading Payman’s posts over the past week and the No new Methodology Please; Let’s focus on Tools post in particular stuck with me because it focuses on something I have been thinking about too. His post talks about the noise in the processes domain where there is a lot of focus on coming up with unnecessarily niche processes rather than focus on actually making processes useful by developing tools that make employing existing mature processes practical.

While Payman’s post focuses on processes, it struck me that even where tools go, often companies employ ALM tools with a narrow focus without fully grasping how they can be fully leveraged and what capabilities these tools pack. Over the last year, we have helped design and deploy solutions based on Microsoft Visual studio Team System (VSTS) for a few customers. One of the key needs that kept leaping out at us from all these engagements is that most customers wanted a way to implement requirements traceability – and they were not always aware that most ALM tools already have the capability to implement end-to-end Requirements Management – in particular traceability.

VSTS for example provides advanced linking capabilities that can be leveraged to allow tracking execution of a requirement from beginning to end (and backwards as well). A number of tools have come up around VSTS to satisfy other aspects of traceability such as the ability to track and link requirements within documents – document traceability.  Traceability has always been this much sought after goal – which many companies have been attempting to address in their tools for many years. Now, the tools exist but most of us are not aware how to leverage them or even that the capability exists.

Over the following few weeks, I am thinking of putting up a series of blog posts focusing on Traceability to think through for myself and others who are interested in Traceability – how to leverage tools – with particular focus on VSTS since I am most familiar with it. A recent solution we implemented for a customer involved integrating VSTS with their CRM solution so that the solution was now truly end-to-end : Right from the time the requirement came in from the customer. In a future post, I hope to outline the lessons we learnt from this particular implementation and also step back to examine the broader implications and advantages of implementing such integrations.

We are also discussing the possibility of perhaps even having a series of webinars that focus on various aspects of Traceability based on our experience over many projects over the years and  how we can leverage VSTS for the purpose.

Watch this space.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Enactment, Microsoft, Osellus, Process Enactment, The state of the art, VSTS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.