blog.e-lm.com

e-LM is proud to support Earth Hour and will be switching off our lights and most appliances (except of course our servers) at 8pm NZ time.

Are you switching off tonight?

e-LM allows you to create customised lifecycles (or workflows) for different assets in the system. These lifecycles define the states (or phases) that an asset must go through.

In addition to the existing support you can now define custom lifecycles for features, risks, issues, change requests, attachments and actions.

The image on the right shows an example lifecycle, in this case for managing attachments. Each box represents a state that the attachment can be in and the arrows indicate the transitions between the states. The red arrows show transitions that require specific authorisation.

In the risk management module you now have the ability to capture the post-mitigation probability and impact on a risk. e-LM uses these values to then calculate the post-mitigation risk and also tracks changes to the post-mitigation risk.

We’ve also added two new report templates. The first is a summary report of all the risks across a project, a programme or across the whole organisation. The second is a detailed risk report, including the status of actions on the risk as well as any comments added to the risk.

We’ve added a whole new module to e-LM that allows you to manage features on a product.

For each feature you can capture a reference, short description, estimated effort, estimated cost and priority. You can also allocate the feature to an owner, attach any type of document to a feature for example MS Word or Excel and allow users to add feedback comments to the feature.

Features can be allocated to particular releases of the product. You can also move features to another release, for example if the feature does not fit into the budget for that particular release.

If you link a particular release to a project then you can link the features in that release to requirements in the project. You can also create new requirements directly from features. On the project side the features will be included in the traceability matrix.

In version 1.48 of e-LM.com you now have the ability to copy a whole project, including all its attachments, risks, requirements, test-cases, dependencies etc. This allows you to create project templates and project baselines:

Project templates

Create a program to contain all of your template projects. When you want to use one of the templates, just use the copy function to copy all of the template’s content to a new programme. You can also assign a new name for the project when you are copying it from the template.

Project baselines

Copy an exiting project to a safe location to create project baselines. This will include all of the data from the project. You can set the permission of the copied project (or the containing programme) to restrict the access users have to these baselines. For example you may want to stop most users from changing anything in the baseline copy.

Happy e-LMing

e-LM version 1.47 went live last night (NZ time) and includes the following exciting enhancements:

Reason Required

Customised lifecycles now support transitions that require a reason to be entered when requesting the transition. This is useful for example to force a user to record a reason when a requirement is cancelled or when a defect is deferred.

Defect Status Report

This new report lists all the defects for a selected organisation, programme, product, release, project, test-run, test-case result or test-step result. The defects are grouped by module as well as by impact.

Customised Lifecycle Support for Test-cases

This means you can now define your own lifecycles for test-cases, including authorisation (sign-off) points and transitions where reasons are required, e.g. when a test-case is placed in a deferred state.

Dialogue box overhaul

We’ve overhauled the formatting of dialogue boxes to better handle bigger fonts selected in the browser.

Default lifecycle when importing requirements

You can now select a lifecycle to apply to new requirements imported from a CSV file.

If you would like any more information on any of these new features then just let me know.

A few weeks ago I posted about Dylan, Mary and William who were in the finals for the TVNZ/NetGuide website design competition. I have just learned that they have been selected as the winners for the Secondary School category…

Well done guys!!! You deserve it!!!

This white paper by Chris White discusses the importance of planning and scope definition for the success of your projects.

Three kids from the Wellington region in New Zealand has made it through to the final for the TVNZ/NetGuide website design competition.

The Otago Gold Rush team is William Leith, Dylan Neale and Mary Fisher. What is unique about this team is that Dylan is completely blind and Mary has a severe visual impairment.

Well done guys!

Here is a good summary framework for the application testing lifecycle.