that is easy to navigate.
22 Integrated RAD Capability to Extend Integration Set: It is possible to extend the ALM suite to cover other aspects of the product or project. A rapid application development capability within the engine of the 4G tool allows addition applications to be created and seamlessly integrated into the suite. Example applications might include: Time sheet management, sales prospect management, lab resource usage, meeting management.
23 Change and Revision Control of Requirement Items: Requirements tracking includes full revision control of requirements as well as change packaging for requirements. The change package becomes the central point of traceability for the collection of changed requirements.
24 Project and Quality Metrics and Forecasting Capabilities: The CM/ALM tool supports the production of a wide variety of project and quality metrics, as well as customization capabilities for new metrics, and allows some level of project forecasting based on these measures.
25 Customer Request Tracking: The 4G CM/ALM tool supports customer request tracking with the ability to report to a customer the status of all completed and outstanding (i.e. not delivered) requests.
26 Peer Review Tracking Support: The 4G CM/ALM supports on-line peer reviews through interactive change-centric review panels which allow navigation through difference/delta displays and identification of actions and issues resulting from the review.
27 Test Run Management and Metrics: The 4G CM/ALM tool tracks the results of test runs against various builds so that it is possible to identify which builds tests have last failed/passed against, and so that sufficient metrics can be provided to indicate both the suitability and expected time frame for release of a build.
28 Data Management: The 4G CM/ALM provides full data management for development, including traceability and the ability to easily adapt the schema to track any and all significant project and product data.
29 Dynamic Management Dashboard Capability, Customizable: 4G CM/ALM dashboards are dynamic so that they can traverse products, builds, releases, sterams or any other potentially dynamic selection criteria (i.e. without having to re-launch the dashboard). In this sense, it is possible to navigate through project or product status across releases, or to navigate through a list of build comparisons. Dashboards are easily customized to have exactly the information desired by the role or by the activity being performed.
30 Electronic Authorizations: Electronic authorizations, including signing of reviews or documents, is supported across the entire suite of ALM applications.
31 Warm-stand-by Disaster Recovery: The 4G CM/ALM tool supports warm standby disaster recovery so that a disk crash, an explosion or a natural disaster does not impede the work of clients - a manual or automated redirection of the client/server connection leaves the client with the ability to continue his/her work without any loss of progress or context.
32 Checkpoint/Recovery Capability: The 4G CM/ALM tool allows relatively small checkpoints to be created and used as consistent recovery points. Ideally, transactions created after the checkpoint can be applied automaticaly to the checkpoint after recovery if desired.
33 Ultra High Reliability and Availability: Data availability is available 99.95% of the time, with a down time of less than 4 hours per year.
34 ITAR Data Segregation: Both Physical and Logical data segregation is supported so that a common set of data can be shared with proper regard to which data is visible to which users.
35 Recovery from Malicious/Subtle Data Corruption: The 4G CM/ALM tool supports identification of and full recovery from data sabatoge or subtle data corruption, with minimal loss of data or effort.
36 Proven Longevity of the Tool on projects (12+ years): The 4G CM/ALM tools has proven its logevity with at
About the author
Joe Farah is the President and CEO of Neuma Technology and is a regular contributor to the CM Journal. Prior to co-founding Neuma in 1990 and directing the development of CM+, Joe was Director of Software Architecture and Technology at Mitel, and in the 1970s a Development Manager at Nortel (Bell-Northern Research) where he developed the Program Library System (PLS) still heavily in use by Nortel's largest projects. A software developer since the late 1960s, Joe holds a B.A.Sc. degree in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto. You can contact Joe at farah@neuma.com
