Issues Management

Kovair's Issues Management solution provides a rich and configurable, global platform for capturing a set of Issues, collaborating on their review, fixing and testing. It ensures that all issues are being correctly accounted for, tracked, prioritized and finally resolved - whether the project was developed in the office next door, or by an offshore partner 10,000 miles and 10 time zones away. In a typical project, these Issues can be more than just bugs or defects and may include Change Requests, Feature Requests, Queries, and Production Issues. Scroll down to see the details of the Issues Management solution offered by Kovair.

Product Features : Issues Management Software

Kovair Issues Management is an anywhere-anytime Issues capture, review, management and fix application. Various types of Issues are shared by diverse team members (customers, project managers, software architects, developers, testers) to collaborate on managing Issues around town or around the globe. Kovair Issues Management's rich implementation of Issues capture, review, management, duplicate analysis, traceability and intelligent reporting in a process-driven methodology enables project teams to effectively and optimally manage and resolve Issues.

100% Web-based

Kovair Issues Management was designed from the ground up as a web-based application optimized for project work that is distributed between buildings on your campus, or at sites around the world. All functionality, including administrative and configuration processes, are supported over the web. Kovair enables

• Better collaboration with customers
• Better collaboration with different internal functional groups
• Better collaboration with service partners
• Telecommuting
• Better management and control of offshore projects

Issues Capture

In Kovair, you can capture Issues in any of the following ways:

• Using Rich Text Editor in Kovair, open a Microsoft Word document or copy-paste a portion of formatted text to the Rich Text Editor.
• Submitting from your Corporate Website or Portal
• Sending them by Email
• Importing from Microsoft Word Document
• Importing from Microsoft Excel spreadsheet
• Importing form a CSV file with configurable format
• Using any third party Issues Management and other tools to define Issues; and in real - time synchronizing them with Kovair through Kovair's Omnibus Integration Bus

Issues & Change Management Methodology

Kovair supports Issues Management of any flavors of proprietary methodologies or processes. All the capabilities necessary to perform Issues Management effectively and effortlessly are built in Kovair that are accessible through a highly user-friendly interface. These include:

• Issues Prioritization (Triage)
• Duplicate Issues determination and linking
• Change Management
• Many-to-many single and bi-directional Traceability Relations with proactive and reactive Impact Analysis
• Issues Process Automation
• Integrations with other tools
• Issues Reporting in multiple formats

Issues Traceability

Though Traceability is a more common feature for a Requirements Management tool, Kovair Global Lifecycle has extended the concept of Traceability Relation and included an enhanced version for the Issues Management application as well.

Issue Traceability View from Kovair
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Kovair allows multiple types of relations including custom ones between Issues. The relations between Issues include dependency relation, and duplicate relation.

Create logical links (depending, affecting, bi-directional) between Issues and view in a number of visualizing tools that Kovair offers. These include Folder Hierarchy Report of Requirements Traceability, Requirements Traceability Matrix and Traceability Relation Network diagram. Kovair allows both proactive and reactive impact analysis. Impact of changes is forwarded to stakeholders automatically to ensure synchronization and address corrective actions so that problems are addressed early to minimize the cost of changes at the end of the lifecycle.

Change Management

Changes are the "reality" of any project. They are also the source of unbridled cost and time overruns. A well defined and consistent Change Management process is the only way in which changes can be reviewed, approved, implemented and tested within acceptable costs and timelines. Kovair's process engine the Omniprocess allows a design, implementation and automation of a Change Management process closely related to the automated Issues Management process.

Issues Prioritization (Triage)

With thousands of Issues submitted from various sources any QA and Product Management organization faces the daunting task of determining the relative importance of these Issues for a set of and release goals. Kovair helps in reviewing and prioritizing for each Issue against a set of business goals. This prioritization process can be embedded within a larger Issues Management process and automated using Kovair's Omniprocess engine. Based on the assigned priorities the process can route Issues in different paths to optimize the resource usage and accelerate resolution of certain high priority items.

Issues Process Automation

Kovair Global Lifecycle Issues Management through the capabilities of its built in Omniprocess Workflow engine facilitates complete automation of the Issues Management workflow the way it happens in your organization by facilitating the creation of a simple State-based or a more complex Task-based process. Most of the issues management software in the market today do not come with built in visual task based process workflow engine like Kovair does. This capability helps simplify task management across time zones by replacing manual task assignment with automatic handoff - such as during the review of Issues before including them in a product roadmap or when the developer in Bangalore is finished fixing issue, the designated tester in Dublin is automatically notified and assigned the next step of ensuring test case creation and testing. If your development is distributed globally this process automation eliminates many emails, phone calls and coordination of task meetings across different time zones and enhances productivity considerably.

Issue Resolution Process
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Issues Reporting

Kovair Global Lifecycle produces reports and Issues documents of various kinds. They include:

• Release Note Document, a fully formatted Word document including Issues fixed in a Release
• Trend Charts
  • Issues submission, closure, reopen trends
  • Burn Down Testing Charts
• Graphical Charts
  • Distribution of Issues by Type, Criticality, Priority, Source...or any other custom field

These reports can be generated by a number of different reporting engines Kovair supports:

• HTML, enabling direct printing from the Issues list page
• Export any lists to Excel for additional formatting and manipulation
• Built-in Crystal Report offers easy way to do custom formatting, or create your own reports from scratch
• Word Reporting enables fully customizable formatting with multi-level data elements from Kovair Global Lifecycle

Capture the Issues from various sources

With Kovair's multiple capabilities of capturing inputs from customers by emails, websites, importing of customer documents and putting them through a well defined Issues Review Process by analysts organization with the Kovair Omniprocess workflow, a company can set up an excellent system of capturing customer inputs for new product ideas as well as improvement of existing products. This provides any company; large or small, a very critical tool for not missing any inputs from a customer. They are always a key factor in enhancing customer satisfaction as well as bringing competitive edge to its product lines for improving its market share. The payback of this system cannot be underestimated!

Evaluate and Prioritize Issues for Releases

Kovair's Issues prioritizing capabilities for Release Management, provides any QA, Product and Engineering Management group a very easy and methodical way of analyzing the content of a given release and make sound decisions that are logical rather than "gut based" from certain individuals.

Increased Productivity

Formalizing and automating Issues management speeds project completion by anywhere from 15 to-20% versus ad hoc or manual processes for managing Issues through Word documents or Spread sheets. So companies cannot and should not think that this type of tool is only essential in a large organization. A good process and agile methodology allows small companies to grow faster and manage their growth much better with proper tools that enhance good quality and productivity.

Better Quality - No more redo's

Having one version of the truth captured and shared globally by all developers means fewer design errors make it through the implementation cycle. The result is significantly less testing time and almost no reworking of the application after system testing. Total project labor cost is saved by 15-20%.

Better team collaboration and communication

A shared single repository enabled through global web-based access to the Issues means no errors because distributed teams are working with the same specifications, and anyone with the appropriate permission can make changes with automatic notifications sent to other team members based on the Change Management Process set up in the Kovair Issues Management System.

Manage regulatory compliance automatically

Regulations are really just Issues generated externally. With 100% backwards and forwards traceability, regulatory compliance is automatically ensured if managed through Kovair Global Lifecycle Issues Management, mitigating a big risk to any business.

Issues Management is very critical but just one of the phases of full Development Lifecycle. If you are ready to manage rest of the Lifecycle with the same set of highly usable tools you may want to upgrade to Kovair's Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution. The ALM solution includes a set of required Applications for software development life cycle including Issues Management, all seamlessly integrated with one another using a single user interface. The applications included in Kovair's Application Lifecycle Management Solution are:

• Requirement Management
• Test Management Tools
• Complete ALM Solution
• Risks Management Tools
• Release Management Process
• IT Project Management