CM: THE NEXT GENERATION - Project vs Product SCM Using Dashboards

may allow you to change the build that you're using for your dashboard summary or build comparison.

Product Dashboards
Product dashboard areas should highlight the readiness of the product for market.  This may involve comparison of current development to previous releases, looking at the outstanding problems, and consideration of the Requirements Traceability Matrix.  The goal here is to be able to take outstanding requests and assess them across the business cases that form each planned release of the product, while also considering product quality.

The main goal of the product dashboard is to allow the product manager, or product management team, to assess market and contract requests and commitments in light of the overall business goals of the product division or program.  Product management involves looking at the current (possibly non-existent) state of the product and the market demands and request backlog, along with any outstanding problem reports, and creating a business case that makes sense to implement.  For already successful products, this typically means allocating requests into one or more release slots and justifying the releases based on the potential ROI. It also deals with coming to terms with quality requirements, in terms of non-conformance treatment, expected product reliability, and the ability to deal with change while maintaining quality.

The product dashboard allows the product manager to rapidly zero in on the items affecting this task. Ideally, the dashboard is not simply a status report, but rather is a product state summary with the ability to allow the product manager to zoom into key areas of concern. Dashboard items might include:

• Outstanding problems by priority - Show a prioritized list of problems which have not yet been fully addressed.

• Recently added features - A list of features recently added sorted functionally or by completion date

• Non-conformances (i.e. requirements not yet addressed) - Features which have not yet been verified as conforming to the product requirements

• Problem arrival/fix rates - Comparison of arrival and fix rates for problems, with sufficient history to infer some information about the current quality of the product

• Updates/Changes by Release - Change packages which have been applied by release and/or iteration

• Recent Requests - Shows the recently raised requests for new features and problem fixes

• Requirement Changes - Identifies changes to the requirements tree since the currently assigned requirements baseline

A sample product dashboard focusing on product changes and problem reports might look like this:

Project Dashboards

Whereas product dashboards deal with the entire product, a project dashboard deals with that portion of product development covered by a specific project.  The goal here is to manage implementation of the release successfully.  Project dashboards come in many flavors, depending on the role perspective.  Roles include the Project Manager, Verification Manager, CM Manager and Developer, among others. And dashboards should be specific to each role.

Project Manager

• Gantt Chart and/or Pert Chart for current release (i.e. project) activity

• Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) of the current project

• Open release (i.e. project) Activities by Priority

• Gating Release Problems by Priority for the upcoming release

• Tasks at risk by Priority and Assignee

• Outstanding Tasks by Group/Team Member for the current release/project

• Updates/Changes in Progress targeted to the current release/project

• Planned versus Actual Effort and/or Checkpoints for the current release/project

Release Manager

• Failed test cases for the current release build of a given promotion level

• Problems fixed this release to date

• Features added in this release to date

• Updates/Changes applied to this release along with any notes attached to such changes

• Updates/Changes in progress,