Managing the team with work items

IBM® Rational® Quality Manager makes it easy to manage your work and to manage the work of your team.

With the Jazz-based work item system, team members can assign tasks and defects to each other and view everyone's status. Test plan authors and test case designers can distribute their work for review and track the status of each reviewer. New and changed requirements are visible to the team, as are the test cases that are needed to satisfy those requirements. Team members are notified automatically of any changes and milestones that impact their work.

You keep track of the tasks that need to do by using work items. A work item is a unit of work, a way of keeping track of the tasks and issues that your team needs to address. You can use work items to manage the work of your team, as described below.

Creating requirements

One important job for development and test teams is satisfying product requirements. Whenever you create a new requirement or import a requirement form an external requirements management tool, a Requirement work item is created, as shown in the following figure.

Requirement work item

When you assign a requirement owner, that user receives a notification in the My Tasks viewlet on the dashboard.

My Tasks viewlet on dashboard

Later, you can use the View Builder to track the requirements and to group the results in a way that makes them easy to manage.

Note: With Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management (CALM), you can manage your requirements with Rational Requirements Composer. In that case, no Requirement work items are created.

To view requirements in the View Builder:

  1. Point to the Requirements icon (Requirements), and click View Requirements.
  2. Group and sort the results, for example, by owner or status.

Assigning work to team members

When you need something done, you assign a work item to someone on the team. For example, after you create a test plan, you might assign several team members to complete sections of the test plan. You might assign one team member to define the test objectives, another team member to define the requirements, and still another to define platform coverage and test environments.

You can do the same thing with test cases and test scripts. After you create a test case, you might assign one team member to define the Test Case Design and another team member to create a Risk Assessment. You might assign one test script to one team member and a second test script to another.

Note: Test scripts are somewhat different in that they do not have sections. As a result, you can only assign one work item per test script.

To assign work:

  1. Open a test plan, test case, or test script.
  2. In the case of the test plan or test case, open the section to assign.
  3. Click Work Item: Create on the right side of the page to open the Create Work Item window.
  4. In the Summary field, enter a short description of the assignment.
  5. In the Owned By field, select an owner to assign the work to.
  6. In the Due field, assign the date that the work is to be done.
  7. Click OK.
  8. Click Save.

After you click Save, a Task-Quality work item is created. The work item number and owner are displayed as shown in the following figure. The owner of the work item receives a notification in the My Tasks viewlet on the dashboard.

Work Item

You will receive notification when the work is complete.

Assigning reviewers and approvers

When you assign someone to review or approve something, such as a test plan, a Task-Review work item is created automatically. The person who is assigned receives a notification in the My Tasks viewlet on the dashboard and other team members can track the progress of the review cycle.

Creating defects

Whenever you create a new defect, a Defect work item is created, as shown in the following figure:

Defect work item

As with the Requirement work item, the owner of the Defect work item receives a notification in the My Tasks viewlet on the dashboard.

The actual Defect work item form varies, depending on the original defect form. For example, the defect form in Rational Quality Manager does not look exactly like the form used in other defect providers, such as Rational Team Concert .

Predefined work item types in Rational Quality Manager

Rational Quality Manager includes the following predefined work item types:

Table 1.
Work item type Description
Requirement A requirement created in Rational Quality Manager or imported from a requirements management tool.
Defect A work item used to track a defect in the application under test.
Task-Review A work item that is assigned to a user who has been asked to review or approve a test plan or test case.
Task-Quality A specific work assignment that is typically associated with an artifact such as a test plan, test case, or test script. For example, when a user is asked to complete a section of a test plan, that user is assigned a Task-Quality work item.
Task Any other generic work item.

Creating automatic links to work items

In Requirement and Defect work items, you can create references to other work items simply by typing a work item type and number. For example, if you type Defect 12 in the Description or Discussion sections of a requirement or defect, a link is created to defect 12. This feature is available for any of the existing work item types.


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