Listen to this articleDear Kovair Customers and Friends,
Last week, Kovair conducted an excellent webinar on the subject of “Achieving Collaborative Development with Tools Integrations.” We demonstrated how the Kovair Omnibus Integration Bus can integrate multiple Application Lifecycle Management or IT Service Management Tools. In the live demo, CTO Sky Basu successfully demonstrated integrations between the Kovair Single Repository Platform and Requisite Pro from IBM for Requirements Management, Quality Center from HP for Test Management, Source Code Management System from Perforce and the Sharepoint Document Repository from Microsoft. Our analogy of this type of integration and ability to collaborate between the users of all these tools is like a symphony in a concert compared to different and disparate tunes from individual instruments of music! So, individual tools from multiple or sometimes even the same vendor do not allow you to achieve such an integrated and collaborative approach to development as the Kovair Platform and the Omnibus Integration Bus can! For a total listing of all the integrations we currently have or are in the process of creating before the end of this year, please visit Kovair Omnibus and review the spreadsheet content by scrolling down on that page.
Recently, Kovair captured a major win in the ITSM/ITIL segment of the market with Hexaware (www.Hexaware.com), a global IT Services Company. We won a bake-off with two other major players in this market. We will be very happy to have any of you consider Kovair ITSM with or without an ITIL focus.
For those of you who are in Australia, Kovair set up an Australian entity under the banner of Kovair Australasia in Melbourne.
Scroll down to read the article about Kovair Issues and Change Management by CTO Sky Basu. He gives a very broad perspective on the topic that you will find interesting.
Hope your organization is seeing the market recovery that everyone is beginning to experience and all of us at Kovair wish you success for the last four months of the year for further growth in your business. Let us help you in any way we can to achieve that success with further improvement in the delivery and quality of your products with Kovair Tools.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and please consider Kovair as your future solution! Please visit our blog as well at www.kovair.com/blog/ for my most recent post.
Sincerely,
Bipin Shah
CEO & Chairman
Kovair Software
www.Kovair.com
Yet Another Issues Management Tool?
By: Sky Basu, Ex-CTO Kovair Software
Every development group needs an Issues Management tool and the variety of tools in the market show the diversity of their needs. This includes ‘sticky notes on the monitor’ to ‘free open source tool’ to ‘very expensive tool.’ Even the same development group upgrades from one tool to another as their needs change.
So what does Kovair Issues and Change Management bring to the mix that makes it different? Flexibility. Whether you are a ten person start-up, or tens of thousands of developers in a strong global software company, and with thousands of projects for your internal and external customers, one single tool can serve you equally well when configured just right for you! There are various areas where Kovair provides superior value than any other Issues and Change Management tools. In the next few issues of this newsletter, we will highlight the superior functionality of Kovair helping our customers in reaching optimal goals in their Issues and Change Management activities.
Let’s start with one area where Kovair has no competition – its industry leading process technology – the Omniprocess. Here are the highlights where Kovair Omniprocess is different from any other in the market in Issues and Change Management:
Automating your Issues and Change Management Process
The effectiveness of an Issues and Change Management depends on the quality and enforcement of the Process it follows. Let us categorize the Issues Management tools by their capability by creating and automating Issues and Change Management processes.
1. No Process: Most of the Issues Management tools are just a repository of Issues and Changes with added capability of allowing you to create some custom fields to categorize the items further. These are adequate for a very small team where everyone knows for each item who is doing what. Emails are used for any communication between the team members outside the tool.
2. State-Based Process Defined by State Transition Table: These tools allow you to create a state-based process by defining a list of states and a table transitioning from one state to another. This is a great improvement over no-process tools but there are still some shortcomings. When using a state transition table, it is difficult to visualize the process and what to view, when using more complex transition conditions.
3. State-Based Process defined by Visual Workflow Designer: These tools also have a state-based process but with a nice visual designer. However, except for the nice process designer, the capability of the process is seriously restricted due to the limitations of the state-based process. A state-based process allows only one activity for each Issue or Change at any time. Consequently no parallel activities are allowed and not more than one person can work on a single item at a time, thus severely limiting productivity.
4. Task-Based Process defined by Visual Workflow Designer: There are very few Issues and Change Management tools in this category. A Task based process has advantages of allowing multiple different activities by different persons at the same time all being performed at the same time in parallel. Consequently, tools of this category have the advantage of a lower process cycle time since they are not restricted to sequential activities only and they can replicate real life processes more faithfully.
Kovair’s Omniprocess Process Automation Technology, an industry leading task based process engine, have powerful features to help define, implement, enforce and automate Issues and Change processes. While comparing with other Issues and Change Management tools, check against the following features:
1. Multiple people playing multiple Roles for multiple conditions
For example, this is the same person who is playing the developer role for Issues related to ‘User Interface’ module but acting as the tester for the ‘Business Rule’ module.
2. Different Workflows for different types
The processes for Issues and Change Management are often different. Kovair allows multiple processes for each Artifact or Entity such as Issues or Change.
3. Parallel Activities for a Process
The differentiator from any state-based process which allows only one activity at any time.
4. Complex Conditional Routing
Allows automatic routing of the process based on complex conditions.
5. Process Change Management
It is highly unlikely that an Issues and Change Management process remains constant from the beginning. Kovair allows versioning and change management of the Processes built-in in the system and this can be done without disrupting the processes currently running.
