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  4. Requirements Tracing through Agile Boards

Requirements Tracing through Agile Boards

Added by Sebastian Siegert over 4 years ago

Hi all,

I am currently evaluating how to best modernize our aged project management and development tool suite. I have in the past implemented a full scale CI/CD pipeline, starting with Jira for user stories / tasks, tracing into code and eventual K8S deployment. However this was a small and detached project in which I had full control and few formal project management requirements.
Now we are starting a huge project with formal requirements, long term project plans and (I fear) several roaring waterfalls involved. I still want to be as modern and agile with this project as possible so I'd like to have the formal processes in the waterfall as connected to each other as possible. We will keep our requirements in IBM Rational DOORS (because history) and I've stumbled across the ConnectAll Universal Adapter (https://www.connectall.com/integration/universal-adapter/) to connect Jira with DOORS. 
So far we are using Microsoft Project for formal PM but we want to switch to OpenProject Enterprise. Now the question is: can we use the OpenProject API to extend ConnectAll in order to create Subtasks in OP Boards and link them to work packages? In theory this should work but maybe there are some caveats that I do not see right now. 
The workflow would look like this:

  • The PMs create their formal (waterfall) project plan with OpenProject
  • The Lead Requirements Engineer evaluates customer requirements and stores them in DOORS
  • ConnectAll adapter fetches the requirements and adds them to a product backlog
  • The Lead Systems Engineer (that would be me) roughly assigns these tasks to work packages
  • The Scrum Team(s) will take these tasks, add those that are not formal requirements and takes them into sprints
  • At the end of the sprint, completed tasks are set to done, the PMs can see that things happen to their work packages
  • ConnectAll adapter modifies the requirements and sets their status to "implemented" or whatever

Am I missing something? Does that make sense at all? I'm curious for your ideas.

Regards
Sebastian


Replies (3)

RE: Requirements Tracing through Agile Boards - Added by Sebastian Siegert over 4 years ago

Well, the community is not really active, is it? Do I already need enterprise support to ask questions or dicuss ideas?

RE: Requirements Tracing through Agile Boards - Added by Jens Ulferts over 4 years ago

I don't know (other than having skimmed over their page) and haven't used ConnectAll. But generally speaking, your scenario should work if there is a system in between that translates between the integrated systems. Then the problem probably boils down to:

  • Authentication & Authorization: OpenProject supports API keys as well as oauth and one can set the permissions as desired.
  • Which system triggers a change: OpenProject can be polled on the API or it can also be told to call a webhook  
  • Conflict resolution: This is probably the hardest as the right resolution is in part dependent on the scenarios the integration is used in. Here, I don't know what ConnectAll will offer and what you want to achieve e.g. if a work package is in an unexpected state.

 But generally speaking, such an integration should work.

RE: Requirements Tracing through Agile Boards - Added by Sebastian Siegert over 4 years ago

Hi Jens, 
thank you for the answers. I've been in contact with the ConnectAll sales team and will have a demo next weeks. The adapter is REST-based and offers a UI-based configuration for the API. According to the company they take care of conflict resolution so I hope that won't be a problem.

What I'm asking myself is whether it's possible to import requirements as subtasks into the backlog of agile boards. We would basically have to fuse requirements and work packages in the middle, coming from the top and the bottom. Is there any way to test that? I'm thinking about hosting an OpenProject instance, creating a basic project plan with some work packages and then use someting like postman to call the API directly. Would that work? If I can make API calls with postman and create tasks that way, the manual fusing (or attaching, to be more precise) should be a piece of cake (although a very large one if we have hundreds of requirements).

Thank you for your support.

Regards
Sebastian

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