Project Lifecycle Setup

We are currently trying to move our lifecycle management over to the Jazz platform. Our situation is this: We have the overall program overseen by the System Integrator, and several different subsystems underneath, each with their own set of requirements, teams, and test cases, that are under the umbrella of the overall program. Some requirements by Subsystem A are verified by Subsystem B tests. System Integrator wants to be able to view reports at the Subsystem level, as well as the system level.

I had been under the impression that I could put the subsystems and overall program in different project areas, but I'm not seeing how that would work. Am I missing something or is the preferred method to just put all the subsystems into one Lifecycle Project?

Thanks!
Stacie

Hi Stacie,

I'm a developer of the Lifecycle Project Administration application.

A Lifecycle Project is a fairly loose concept and there's no penalty for creating and deleting them -- that is, the project areas that they encapsulate are not affected -- so you have some room to experiment and find what works best for you. The main advantages of using lifecycle projects to organize and access project areas are three-fold: you should organize things such that you're getting the most valuable benefit for you:

1. If your Requirements, Quality, and Change Management project areas do not exist, you can use a Lifecycle Project template to create them, which automatically establishes associations between the project areas. This merely saves you some manual steps to set up the associations, which can be removed or added to after the fact.

2. The Projects page in the Lifecycle Project Administration application is a common location where the child project areas (called "artifact containers") of a lifecycle project can be accessed. Each artifact container can be expanded to show the associations between that container and other artifact container, even if those other containers are in a different lifecycle project (as in your example of Subsystem A requirements being verified by Subsystem B tests). This would be a good landing page for your System Integrator, though you should be aware that the Lifecycle Project Administration application is currently only usable for users with JazzAdmins privledges (see defect https://jazz.net/jazz/resource/itemName/com.ibm.team.workitem.WorkItem/191083).

3. In the Members page of LPA, users can be added to all of the artifact containers of a given lifecycle project with a single gesture, and roles for each member can be viewed and configured in a single location. For me, this feature would chiefly govern how I organized my projects into lifecycle project containers. If Subsystem A and Subsystem B each have distinct teams of the same users who work with their project areas, I would create a lifecycle project for each subsystem. If they include the same users, I would consider using a single lifecycle project to manage them.

There is no integration with or accessibility to reports in the Lifecycle Project Administration application. It sounds like your System Integrator would be best served by a dashboard which can include viewlets that track data across project areas, including report-driven content.