R&D Reporter > Case studies

HP Indigo Accelerates R&D processes with ALMtoolbox R&D Reporter

"ALMtoolbox R&D Reporter helps us improve collaboration within the R&D team and increase traceability of individual efforts. We use R&D Reporter to generate real time status reports on our different projects at a fine grained level of deliverable items, including bug fixes and new features recorded in our Rational ClearCase activities."

Ziv Lachish, Software Quality Manager at HP Indigo

Background

HP-Indigo is a fully owned unit of HP responsible for a line of commercial presses, including commercial printing, direct mail, photo, publications, labels, flexible packaging, folding cartons and specialty printing.

The Software Quality department has overall responsibility for configuration management, change management and quality assurance processes in all Indigo projects. The team supports Indigo projects by optimizing the selection, implementation and support of software development tools.

The Challenge

The R&D team at Indigo is responsible for numerous projects which are constantly being updated in response to internal requirements and customer needs. This makes internal communication around updated tasks and performance measurement a significant challenge.

The Software Quality team implements some Agile practices, including continuous integration, which creates a need for frequent documentation of changes made to previous builds. An additional issue that arises frequently is listing the exact contents of a specific version.

These challenges were complicated by the use of two different systems for tracking changes - HP Quality Center (QC) and IBM Rational ClearCase. Coordinating the change cycle in two separate systems proved to be difficult and error-prone.

The Solution

Together with ALMtoolbox, the Software Quality team created a fully integrated Application Lifecylce Management (ALM) process that allows each role within the department to receive an updated report on the progress and the work to be done in their specific area.

As a first step, an automated procedure collects the information entered by Program Managers and QA in both ClearCase and Quality Center, storing this metadata as ClearCase attributes. Then, ALMtoolbox R&D Reporter is used to retrieve the necessary information, customizing its presentation according to the needs of each team member. The reports, produced automatically at predefined periods, include all changes made or planned for each project, as well as project contents, shown from a bird's eye view or in a drill down to the level of activities, deliveries, baselines and components.

An important way by which R&D Reporter accelerates work is providing the QA team with an accurate real-time report of the specific activities they need to test for a specific project. This enables them to plan their work better and saves time on manual searching for changes or waiting for the development team to supply them with this information.

Another way R&D Reporter accelerates development is by presenting the exact changes between two stable releases (baselines). Since HP Indigo utilizes continuous integration, reports are automatically generated every day. The R&D reporter thus saves time on tracking what changes were made between releases and prevents mistakes and misunderstandings.

In general, the ability to independently generate reports on different aspects of the project through a user-friendly interface has greatly simplified coordination and internal communications. Team members can now quickly receive the precise information they need without interrupting the work of their colleagues.

Additional Benefits

• Integrating Quality Center with ClearCase into one collaborative Application Lifecycle Management solution
• Making development, change requests and QA work transparent and shared
• Business Analytics: independent reports on development progress enable management to make informed decisions.