WHITE PAPER. Standardization in HP ALM Environments. Tuomas Leppilampi & Shir Goldberg.

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1 1 WHITE PAPER Standardization in HP ALM Environments Tuomas Leppilampi & Shir Goldberg

2 2 1 INTRODUCTION HP ALM IN A NUTSHELL CHALLENGES IN USING HP ALM LACK OF GOVERNANCE NO VISIBILITY WASTED EFFORT SILOED TEAM CULTURE LACK OF DATA INTEGRITY KEY GUIDELINES TO OPTIMAL HP ALM USAGE TEMPLATES REPORTING & VISIBILITY CUSTOMIZATIONS FOR HP ALM ASSURE OFFERING CONCLUSION Introduction Application Delivery has a critical role in the success of companies. Technology driven business and shorter time to market are required to win market share. Companies implement their business processes in IT systems over the years. When it is time to change and improve processes it is important to be able to understand which changes have the most impact. Complex cross application dependencies, constantly emerging new methodologies and shorter release cycles in application delivery makes understanding which process improvements work and which don t a real challenge. In essence, we want to be able to make the right decisions and provide centralized centers of excellence with the ability to quickly implement changes and to effectively measure the impact. Standardization is a way of gaining more visibility into application delivery. Reporting and communication become easier when people are using the same terminology and are adhering to the same processes, wherever applicable, within the organization. Standardization translates into cost savings and faster release cycles.

3 3 2 HP ALM in a nutshell HP has a comprehensive portfolio of integrated products providing a complete suite for Application (Development) Life Cycle Management (HP ALM). What makes HP s suite attractive for enterprise level organizations is its proven scalability and strong partner network, allowing for large user volumes and most aspects of integration with other tools / suites. In addition, HP ALM is the clear market leader in this space. HP ALM contains modules for managing everything from release and requirement planning all the way to defects uncovered in testing the final product. It helps organizing initiatives into HP ALM Projects. Each project has its own database storing entities such as Releases, Requirements, Test Cases and Defects. In addition, each HP ALM Project has a repository, which stores files like attachments and scripts. HP ALM Projects are flexible containers that can represent an application, application family, program, project, business unit etc.

4 4 3 Challenges in using HP ALM As HP ALM is a very customizable platform, customers customize it in many different ways, even within the same organization. We have uncovered several challenge areas that are common to many of our customers. 3.1 Lack of governance Governance means making sure companies stay on track to achieve their strategies and goals. Having a fragmented HP ALM environment presents significant challenges when trying to keep up with management requirements of measuring e.g. QA activities effectiveness or IT department performance in general. In addition, administration can become a burden and as support is not readily available, projects slow down because they have to govern and support themselves. As the World Quality Report shows, a growing number of organizations have a fully operational Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE), and even more companies are considering implementing this approach. For a functional TCoE, a high level of governance is crucial. 3.2 No visibility When HP ALM projects are used with different usage models and terminology, it is difficult to understand and combine reports coming from different sources. This also applies to cross organization visibility: the more fragmented the ways of using HP ALM, the less transparency there is in the organization. The lack of visibility leads to skewed views into development progress and product quality. 3.3 Wasted effort Most organizations have subject matter experts who can create reports from many different HP ALM projects and explain the status and findings to the executives from high level company perspective. Is it really efficient to use the SME s time to gather reports and make sense of the data? Is actively trying to explain reports an efficient way of doing things? These people would be better utilized for providing important insight into product development and company strategy. It is also rather common for reports creators to massage the data during the process to make things look better. 3.4 Siloed team culture Most teams use HP ALM while being very focused on the work at hand. Releases follow each other back to back and there is little time to evaluate the processes used with HP ALM. Over time, there will be challenges and when the teams are working in silos, they often feel that there is no support for their activities, as no-one really understands their unique needs. Also, application delivery is not progressing as quickly as it could because they are missing on best practices and usage enhancements discovered somewhere else in the HP ALM user community. In a TCoE, testing experts need to be able to engage in projects in different areas with a learning curve as short as possible. The benefits of TCoE are greatly reduced in a siloed development culture.

5 5 3.5 Lack of data integrity If the HP ALM projects configurations are out of control, the data is often out of control too. This leads to challenges when trying to understand the big picture. Defect severity, priority and status values can mismatch between projects. Applications, versions and features are being called different names, with underscores, spaces, with or without version numbers The possibilities are endless. For a TCoE to be successful the data simply cannot be out of control. Everything that is done in application delivery boils down to gathering meaningful data to supports making decisions based on facts. 4 Key guidelines to optimal HP ALM usage The key guidelines for a centrally governed HP ALM platform in a TCoE are as follows: Practice strict control in allowing individual project specific customizations Focus on collecting data that you will be using for driving progress and making decisions Collect company wide data in unified format using predefined, non-editable lists whenever possible Promote best practices throughout the organization Provide centralized support to all user groups Adopt the use of HP ALM project templates 4.1 Templates HP ALM provides central configuration templates for HP ALM projects, from which changes can be pushed down to linked child projects using a simple administrative task. When designing the template, its configuration should cover all aspects of data collection, user access rights and enforced processes. In addition, a template could cover reporting dashboards and predefined views designed for different roles. In general, the company specific template design documentation should allow to review all the possible aspects of customizing HP ALM and tell what can and cannot be changed. Developing a template requires a continuous discussion between the main users of HP ALM and a change control board. It is advised to start the template usage early and make adjustments frequently to quickly reach a good level of template maturity. It is important to ensure that all user groups can work smoothly with the template while it covers all strategic company needs. There are many benefits in standardization and using central templates, the key ones are: The time to implement and deploy new changes and business rules is greatly reduced: less resources required, faster reaction time change in one place, deploy to many Ability to easily achieve standardized cross-project reports and common configurations for integrations

6 6 Implement a standard process of work: When standards are the same, the learning curve of resources allocated to initiatives is minimized 4.2 Reporting & Visibility The needs of the people who use the data gathered in HP ALM must be identified. What kinds of decision points exist in the processes? What data is needed to follow application delivery progress and product quality? Answering such questions if often the starting point of the template design process. The data that is gathered must support strategic decision making and provide operational visibility. Data integrity is crucial: list type fields must be verified against the lookup list items and string type fields need to be minimized. Some reports can be project specific, but the data used has to be clearly identified. HP ALM provides a way to have data fields outside of the template and this option should be explored when necessary. 4.3 Customizations for HP ALM HP ALM requires support, governance and ongoing development. A change control board consisting of business representatives, tool specialists and IT managers needs to visualize and maintain a roadmap for tool development. While talking about control and governance, we must also understand project specific needs and allow users to take advantage of the HP ALM customization possibilities. This must follow a well-planned change process. Often an end user group or the change control board comes up with ideas supporting company level initiatives through a usage process or customization in HP ALM. Those ideas should be collected, evaluated and implemented to all the projects in the organization.

7 7 5 Assure Offering Assure has been providing solutions and software for HP ALM customers since 2006, we have faced the challenges of company growth, changing organizational structures and ever tightening global competition through our customers. We see an increasing number of customers looking to centralize and standardize their HP ALM. The main challenges preventing HP ALM customers from moving to a standardized, template based HP ALM are: Difficulty to bring different stakeholders to an agreement on a template that supports all needs in the organization A large number of different customizations across HP ALM projects, some are almost unknown to the central team driving standardization Technical challenge of converting the existing HP ALM projects configurations to be compatible with the agreed template. Lack of support from executives often due to limited understanding of the benefits of standardization Assure provides a software suite and methodology making HP ALM standardization an easy and simple process while mitigating the risk of data loss and corruption. Our customers have standardized thousands of HP ALM projects, supporting the growing trend of TCoE, using a central, common usage model. The Assure Standardization Suite is a unique offering for HP ALM, as even HP has been using it to standardize their own projects.

8 8 What makes Assure Standardization Suite a complete solution, is the fact that it is used to standardize both the HP ALM project data structure as well as the data contained within the entity fields. It also provides the analysis tools necessary to understand the current level of standardization in a HP ALM environment. Staying ahead of the game in the global market requires investing in Application (Development) Lifecycle Management tools and expertise. Assure helps customers maximize their investment by providing the means and tools to reach a mature, streamlined model that provides accurate, understandable and business focused data to support crucial decisions. 6 Conclusion Any organization using HP ALM should consider standardization. Even a quick assessment of the current configurations and customizations might save a lot of pain with future HP ALM version upgrades and provide good guidance when implementing companywide reporting, integrations or asset sharing. A standard use of HP ALM and cross project metrics and KPIs is a cornerstone of a successful TCoE. It is crucial to have strong stakeholder support and financial backing for standardization projects. Customers must make sure that once a good template is agreed upon, they can swiftly move into physically standardizing the HP ALM projects and enjoy the many benefits it brings. About Assure Assure is a leading provider of Analytics for Application Delivery and solutions for HP ALM customers. By using our TotalView product, organizations gain unforeseen visibility into all aspects of the Application Lifecycle, and achieve the ability to make decisions that greatly improve release quality, decrease cycle times, increase the productivity of teams and reduce operational costs. Assure s standardization suite is the only commercial solution for complete standardization HP ALM, providing fast and easy solution for large scale, complex standardization challenges.