Listen to this articleAnalytics is commonly used to describe, analyze, predict and improve business performance. It is a visual representation of critical data that gives a clear insight into the release progress or project health, and team performance, thus helping in the successful completion of project or software delivery. Peter Drucker, who pioneered modern business management once said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.
Reporting – The Major Pain Point of Non-Integrated ALM
In any non-integrated ALM scenario, teams work in different tools as per their domain of specialty. This makes the data remain locked in silos instead of being shared among different functional groups in a collaborative manner. They look into the reports based on the data that are stored only in their own tools. For example, business analysts get to see reports specific to requirements, developers view reports based on change sets and code files, and testers are confined to test cases and test run related reports. But, what about the project managers who need to continuously monitor project progress and ensure smooth delivery? For example, a project manager may need to view a release progress report based on cross-tool data. In order to generate or prepare such consolidated reports, managers need to depend on manual feedbacks from different teams. They need to interact with different teams and tools to collect artifact data and then go through the daunting task of consolidating them for managerial representation.
This raises the demand for a central repository based integrated platform which will enable all stakeholders to view the progress of the release in real-time. The solution should integrate all the tools being used for different phases of ALM and bring the stakeholders close to each other irrespective of the time zone they are in.
How Kovair Addresses these Pain Points
Kovair ALM along with its proprietary SOA architected ESB-based integration framework – Omnibus provides a central repository based integrated ALM platform. Omnibus, the integration middleware platform from Kovair is capable of integrating open source, legacy, as well as homegrown tools used by organizations. It is aware of all the events occurring in different tools and is able to capture relevant data from those connected tools. Stakeholders can not only have a broad level view of consolidated data across all tools in a single screen but also have the ability to drill down to the granular levels of data real-time. With Kovair’s high-end reporting system, one can create nine different types of graphical and non-graphical reports such as Tabular, Tabular with Summary, Form, Form with Summary, Distribution Metrics, Matrix, Trend, Custom Crystal, and Word. Kovair also allows the creation of highly configurable role based dashboards using various types of gadgets including Catalog, Gantt charts, and Reports. Clicking on any part of a dashboard displays drilldown data for in-depth analysis.
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Benefits of cross-tool reporting with Kovair:
- All the data is captured live from the system of record.
- Reports are based on real-time data coming directly from the tools.
- No time wasted in manually aggregating data from multiple tools.
- No scope of human errors.
- Allows managers to quickly identify problem areas and thus take corrective actions.
How Stakeholders Benefit from Consolidated Reporting
Benefits for developers
For any developer, it is very important to perform frequent code analysis and produce results in a shorter span of time. Manually doing all these activities decreases the actual productivity of the developer while writing code. In an integrated development environment, users can automatically generate reports on Code Analysis, Builds, and Defects. This increases the overall productivity of developers and thereby improves the predictability of deliverables.
Benefits for testers
A tester would always like to keep track of the total number of test cases that are passing or failing. Now, this is pretty simple and could be obtained using any of the test management tools in the market. But, what if he or she wants to see the total number of requirements covered by test cases, wherein requirements and test cases are maintained in two different tools, for example, Kovair Requirements Management and HP QC respectively. In such a scenario, cross-tool reporting is the only means available for testers.
Benefits for project managers
Generating consolidated reports on the overall progress of a release is a daunting task for managers. They heavily depend on manual feedback from different teams and need to consolidate the information for report creation. Real-time cross-tool reports and dashboards, in an integrated tool setup, remove this manual dependency and provide more realistic data for taking informative decisions. Dashboards can be really useful for a CIO, business manager or any other senior executive looking into the overall product delivery and customer feedback system.
Benefits for Help Desk managers
Help desk teams are often evaluated based on the successful distribution of incidents, problems and change requests among development teams and timely reporting on the Ticket status to customers.
Dashboards showing Incident submission and distribution trend, or the number of open Incidents breaching SLAs through graphical charts help service desk mangers take quick and corrective actions.
Conclusion
In an organization, comprehensive metrics and real-time visibility of the progress of a release are always important for the successful and timely delivery of software. Kovair along with its integration platform Kovair Omnibus helps organizations to generate all kinds of reports based on real-time data and keep all stakeholders informed.
