Improve software development project success with better information

Improve software development project success
with better information
Advantages of automated measurement, analytics, and reports

Skill Level: Introductory

Ben Williams (bwilliams@uk.ibm.com)
Senior Product Manager and Reporting Strategy Lead
IBM

Eric Larsen (ehlarsen@us.ibm.com)
Senior Product Manager, Rational Insight software
IBM

Jonathon Chard (jon.chard@uk.ibm.com)
Systems Marketing Manager
IBM

17 May 2011

Automated reporting can help you document compliance and eliminate the errors,
inconsistency, and wasted time and effort inherent in manual reporting. Automated
measurement can help improve processes and streamline project delivery. This
article describes how automated reporting and measurement tools, such as IBM
Rational Publishing Engine and Rational Insight, help software and systems
development teams provide accurate, timely, and appropriate information to decision
makers.

Reporting across organizations presents challenges
The ability of organizations to accurately answer these questions drives success in
systems and software development:

• Are we on target?

Improve software development project success with better information Trademarks
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• Are we within budget?
• Are my projects contributing effectively to my operational objectives?
• How well are these operational objectives helping to satisfy our business
goals?
• Can we easily demonstrate compliance with customer requirements or
industry standards?
• Are we ready to deliver yet?
However, to answer such questions, teams must have access to accurate, timely,
and appropriate project information and the ability to put it in the hands of decision
makers. Because data is typically spread across different disciplines, geographically
dispersed teams, and tools, team members struggle to quickly get the right
information in the right format at the right time.

Adding to the challenge is the push toward making products more instrumented,
interconnected, and intelligent, or what IBM calls "smarter." Smarter products rely
upon the tight integration of sophisticated software with hardware and electronics.
This leads to increased systems and software development complexity and to
demanding larger, more diverse teams than ever before. As a result, information has
become even more dispersed across physical, organizational, and technological
boundaries.

This article discusses the difficulties that organizations face as they gather critical
information and explores the use of automation to increase the efficiency and
effectiveness of reporting and measurement. It also describes IBM® Rational®
software that can help automate reporting and measurement to improve project,
program, and organizational management and decision makers' abilities to influence
positive outcomes.

Manual reporting can cause problems
Software development organizations typically use existing and familiar tools, such as
word processing or spreadsheet programs, to report and measure information.
Although these might be adequate methods for local or one-time documentation,
they require time-consuming manual effort from many individuals across the
software development cycle to assemble and analyze the information for project
reporting and measurement.

Manual reporting
• Expensive

• Error prone


ibm.com/developerWorks developerWorks®

• Inflexible

• Opaque

• Slow

Having individuals extract and analyze information takes valuable time away from
employees' core responsibilities. Moreover, manual reporting and measurement
processes are dependent on the way an individual chooses to gather and analyze
information. Consistency is essential when organizations update documents
throughout a development lifecycle or repeat measurements over time to identify
trends. Even with guidelines in place, manual processes leave opportunities for
individuals to interpret information or perform tasks differently. As a result, it is
difficult to generate consistent reporting and measurement data, which makes it hard
to spot the real trends in the information.

Finally, because organizations must frequently generate reports for traceability,
compliance, and decision making, sometimes business analysts or developers force
reporting mechanisms into processes where they do not belong. For example, a
developer who is modeling in Unified Modeling Language (UML) knows that he must
create a particular diagram within the model for report documentation. To streamline
the report generation process, he adds text boxes to the model to identify which
model elements meet which requirement. Although this practice simplifies reporting,
the developer now has report-specific data and formatting information embedded in
the actual design model, which represents inherent risk to design information
integrity.

Organizations need a more efficient, accurate and repeatable way of generating
reports and measurements. To address compliance requirements and gain key
business insights, they must provide stakeholders and decision makers with the right
information at the right time. To do so, they need the ability to quickly publish
accurate, timely documentation and real-time dashboards that allow users to
recursively drill down through levels of abstraction to get to information relevant to
the task at hand.

Automation results in more accurate, reliable data
Rather than manually measuring and documenting business-critical information,
developers can use tools specifically designed to automate such tasks. As Figure 1
shows, by using the right software, you can extract information from repositories
across the systems or software development lifecycle (spanning requirements
management, modeling, testing, and change and configuration management), as
well as beyond the traditional development boundaries into other business systems.
Automated tools can collect information quickly, easily, and unobtrusively from
across the enterprise, delivering accurate, timely reports and enabling better



decisions about the right course of action for projects.

Figure 1. Automated reporting can combine information from multiple sources

As previously discussed, good tools used for the wrong purpose provide, at best,
limited value. However, tools specifically designed for automated reporting and
measurement deliver fast, accurate results that cater to specific needs. If you
choose tools that offer automated document generation, as well as measurement
and development analytics, you also streamline your compliance and
decision-making processes.

Note:
There are two broad categories of information presentation that are important for
software and systems development:

• Software and systems documentation, such as requirements and design
documents, as well as compliance documents.
• Development analytics, such as requirements coverage, test coverage,
defect trending reports, and other such measures that can be aggregated
in executive development status dashboards.
For simplicity, IBM refers to both categories as "reporting."



Document generation

Advantages of automated reporting and
measurement
Manual reporting is inherently:
Faster and more transparent
Provides access to up-to-the-minute information, with quick,
on-demand generation of documents

More accurate
Draws data directly from the source

Less error-prone
Makes manual intervention unnecessary

Protects development data from unnecessary risk
Avoids the need for manual data modification for reporting
purposes

Definitive
Allows a conceptually clearer approach as documents become
an artifact of the process rather than driving the process

Autonomous
Enables stakeholders to access information on demand without
requiring a subject matter expert's time to assemble information

Flexible
Transforms information to suit the content and format needs of
different consumers

Businesses continue to rely on documentation as a critical communication
mechanism, both internally and across contractual boundaries. Development teams
are often required to deliver documentation according to specific standards that are
imposed either by customers or by industry regulators.

A key benefit of automated document generation is the separation of formatting and
content. By creating report templates, you need to format the layout for the
information that you need only once. When it's time to update it, you can populate
the report template with the latest information. In an automated report, information is
also always consistent between versions. IBM® Rational® Publishing Engine
includes templates that you can customize (see the last section for more about this
tool).

Automation inherently makes a process more efficient. In the case of reporting, it



also enables organizations to control documentation production, rather than being
controlled by the need to produce documentation. In other words, as developers
work on projects, they don't need to worry about how they will document their output.
This gives them the freedom to focus on their core responsibilities.

Measurement and development analytics

Measurements are essential to improving processes. As William Thomson (Lord
Kelvin) said nearly a century ago: "If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it."
Measurements enable a project team to gather feedback on an aspect of project
performance so the team can modify the process to more effectively control that
aspect. Measurement is a fundamental aspect of the IBM approach to incremental,
continuous improvement. Other commonly used approaches, such as Capability
Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), require quantitative management of processes
through measurement to drive ongoing process optimization. However,
measurement is only part of the story. It is equally important that organizations
understand what the data means to various stakeholders.

Automated measurement and analysis tools help organizations turn insight into
action, and they bring efficiency and repeatability to the measurement process. The
value of repeatable measurements is even greater over time, because analyzing
trends further improves the predictability of project outcomes.

Much like automated document generation solutions, automated measurement and
analytics collect data from disparate repositories across the development and
delivery lifecycle (and in many cases, beyond). After the data is collected, these
tools can show trends of that data over time and display the trend in appropriate
formats that stakeholders can easily see and understand. By using software for
automated measurement and analytics, you can generate different, yet consistent,
metrics reports and views for stakeholders at all levels of the business, from
developers to the CTO. This helps the development organization contribute to the
operational objectives and overall business goals more effectively.

Rational reporting and measurement tools work together
Rational reporting and measurement tools can help you to extract and combine
information from a wide variety of IBM Rational development tools, including these
products:

• IBM® Rational® Focal Point software for product and portfolio
management
• IBM Rational Requirements Composer software for requirements
elicitation



• IBM Rational DOORS® software for requirements management
• IBM Rational System Architect software for enterprise architecture and
framework modeling
• IBM Rational Rhapsody® software for visual modeling
• IBM Rational Quality Manager software for web-based test planning, test
execution, and defect management
• IBM Rational ClearCase® and IBM Rational ClearQuest® software for
change and configuration management
• IBM Rational Asset Manager tool for software development asset
management
As well as extracting information from other Rational tools, Rational reporting and
measurement solutions can extract information from nearly any source that either
generates XML data or exposes a Representational State Transfer (REST) interface.
In this way information from multiple sources can be combined to produce more
complete reporting.

"Good
tools
used
for
the
wrong
purpose
provide,
at
best,
limited
value.
But
tools
specifically
designed
for
automated
reporting
and
measurement
deliver
fast,
accurate
results
that
cater
to
specific
needs."



IBM Rational Publishing Engine

Developers can quickly produce accurate, up-to-date documentation by using
Rational Publishing Engine software (also see Resources). It includes prebuilt
templates that you can use or easily customize by using drag-and-drop technology.

The Document Studio interface (Figure 2) provides an intuitive workplace for
document template design and customization, with easy access to a palette of
document elements, data source schema, document element properties, and the
template outline. You can build document templates visually by dragging the
required document element from the palette to the appropriate point in the template.
In this way, you can easily add document formatting items, such as headers, footers,
tables (including tables of contents) and boilerplate text

Data source schemas give access to information in the data source tools. You can
insert this information into the document by dragging the appropriate schema
element into a container in the template. You can apply conditional formatting to
extracted data to further enhance the document. For example, a table of
requirements could highlight unsatisfied requirements in red. You can use the
template outline to navigate around the template and to set the required styles for
elements. And, with the Properties window, you can view and modify the properties
of selected template items.

Figure 2. The Rational Publishing Engine Document Studio interface



Larger view of Figure 2.

When the template is complete and the data sources are specified, you can click a
Generate Report button, and the report template will gather current information from
the sources and transform and populate that data in the appropriate places in the
template. It can produce documents in these widely used data formats so that all
stakeholders can easily access the reports:

• Microsoft Word
• XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO).
• Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)
• HTML.
IBM Rational Insight

The IBM Rational Insight automated measurement and development analytics
software uses the same flexible REST interfaces as the Rational Publishing Engine
tool to extract data from systems and software development data sources. However,
rather than publishing a document, the Rational Insight application collects and
organizes the data in a central repository. Then it outputs consolidated data,



measurements, and trends to customizable dashboards, as shown in Figure 3. This
flexibility enables stakeholders and decision makers to obtain the up-to-date and
accurate information they need, when and where they want it.

Figure 3. Customizable dashboards to display the right information

Larger view of Figure 3.

Rational Insight is a key technology in the implementation of a measured,
incremental improvement approach, which provides organizations with a structured
way to align their systems and software development capabilities to business
objectives. With this technique, organizations define operational approaches to
reach business objectives and then apply practices to implement those approaches.
Metrics measure and control the implementation and effectiveness of such practices,
and the Rational Insight application provides the automation mechanism for the
measurement of those metrics. (Also see Resources.)

Automation is about more than just productivity
Use of automated reporting and measurement tools, such as Rational Publishing
Engine and Rational Insight, is a key to providing accurate, timely and appropriate
information to decision makers. Automated reporting can help you document
compliance and eliminate the errors, inconsistency, and wasted time and effort



inherent in manual reporting. Automated measurement can help improve processes
and streamline project delivery. Ultimately, organizations that automate reporting
and measurement help improve the success rates for their projects, gain productivity
across their development teams, and improve their ability to meet high-level
business objectives.



Resources
Learn
• Browse the developerWorks page for Rational Publishing Engine. Also check
the Rational Publishing Engine Information Center for documentation for all
versions, or get support from the Rational Publishing Engine help system.
• For more about Rational Insight, browse the developerWorks page for links to
technical articles and many related resources, the product overview page for
details, and explore the support page, as well as the user guide in the
Information Center.
• Visit the Rational software area on developerWorks for technical resources and
best practices for all Rational Software Delivery Platform products.
• Stay current with developerWorks technical events and webcasts focused on a
variety of IBM products and IT industry topics.
• Attend a free developerWorks Live! briefing to get up-to-speed quickly on
IBM products and tools, as well as IT industry trends.
• Watch developerWorks on-demand demos, ranging from product
installation and setup demos for beginners to advanced functionality for
experienced developers.

• Improve your skills. Check the Rational training and certification catalog, which
includes many types of courses on a wide range of topics. You can take some
of them anywhere, any time, and many of the "Getting Started" ones are free.
Get products and technologies
• Get the free trial download for Rational Insight.
• Check the Trials and Demos page for Rational software.
• Evaluate IBM software in the way that suits you best: Download it for a trial, try
it online, use it in a cloud environment, or spend a few hours in the SOA
Sandbox learning how to implement service-oriented architecture efficiently.
Discuss
• Participate in technical discussions in the Rational Publishing Engine forum.
• Participate in technical discussions in the Rational Publishing Engine forum.
• Join the Performance Management with Rational Insight forum to ask questions
and participate in discussions.
• Share your knowledge and help others who use Rational software by writing a
developerWorks article. You'll get worldwide exposure, RSS syndication, a



byline and a bio, and the benefit of professional editing and production on the
developerWorks Rational website.
• Follow Rational software on Facebook and Twitter (@ibmrational), and add your
comments and requests.
• Ask and answer questions and increase your expertise when you get involved
in the Rational forums, cafés, and wikis.
• Connect with others who share your interests by joining the developerWorks
community and responding to the developer-driven blogs.

About the authors
Ben Williams
Ben Williams is a senior product manager and reporting strategy lead
for the IBM Rational brand. Ben joined the IBM Rational organization in
2008 through the Telelogic acquisition. While at Telelogic, he was the
sole product manager in the worldwide central engineering business
unit, one of the four software business units, which provided l common
technologies and capabilities to the three core product divisions,
covering requirements management, change and configuration
management, and modeling. During this time, he led a team that
created what is now known as Rational Publishing Engine, which has
become the Rational technology for document generation. Before his
product management roles, he was a technical account manager and
requirements management specialist for more than seven years. Ben is
a keen supporter of the open source movement, having previously been
an active member (with Committer status) on the Eclipse Process
Framework (EPF) Project and now as a member of IBM's Linux
Champion program. He continues to play an active role in the Open
Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) community, contributing to
both the Core and Reporting workgroups.

Eric Larsen
Eric Larsen is a senior product manager for the IBM Rational Insight,
IBM Rational SoDA, and IBM Rational ProjectConsole products. He has
been working in the computer engineering field since 1979. When he
joined Rational software 10 years ago, he began developing a measure
management dashboard application that eventually became the
Rational ProjectConsole product. After that, he became a senior



software engineer for Rational ProjectConsole, a software development
manager for Rational ProjectConsole, and a software development
manager for the Rational Portfolio Manager Web UI initiative. More
recently, Eric brought his experience with reporting, metrics, and project
management tools into the product management position for the
Rational Enterprise Reporting product line, which includes the legacy
ProjectConsole and SoDA applications, as well as IBM Rational Insight
software.

Jonathon Chard
Jonathon has wide experience in standards, technologies, and tools
across the entire systems and software development lifecycle, gained
from eight years as a consultant within IBM and, formerly, Telelogic.
Before this, he spent 12 years as a systems engineering practitioner
within the automotive industry. Jonathon studied electronic and
electrical engineering at the University of Manchester, in the UK. He
received a B.Sc., with honors, in 1984, an MSc in 1985, and a PhD in
1988.


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