Change Control Boards and Release Planning

Presented by Alicia Iwaniw

AGENDA

• Definitions • Reasons for having a CCB process • Who are the drivers • Process • Type of CCBs • Supporting tools • Metrics • Tips

Definitions

• CCB: Group of appropriate people who meet periodically, analyze change requests for consistency, review changes in a project, assign champions to implement corrective actions, monitor progress, check closures. • Release Planning: Meetings held periodically to review the business integrity of a project/product release. The release planning takes under consideration the customer, marketing and financial issues and communicates via CCB meetings the urgency of a problem resolution.

Reasons for having a CCB process

• The CCB process is required to ensure schedule and business commitments for planned releases.

• Controlled process to estimate Impact of changes • Communication that authorizes changes to a baseline release

Who are the drivers

• CCB Coordinator • Quality • Requirements • Product architect • Software • Hardware • Test / Integration • Project Management • Requestors / Petitioners

New CRs approval Process

Request Entry CCB Coordinator reviews Request Core Team Reviews Requests N Approve Requests ?

Doc.

Why Rejected.

Y CCB meeting N Impact needed ?

Y Impact Analysis Impact Analysis Impact Analysis Schedule CCB Mtg.

N E-Approved?

Y Assign and start cooking the solution

Type of CCBs

Infrastructure Inputs Subscriber Solutions

Supporting tools

• Rational Software Defect tracking tool: ClearDDTS • QSS requirements tool: DOORS • Internally developed scripts for reports and metrics generation.

Metrics

• CR lifecycle based on severities • No. of CRs per release • Closure Rate • Unresolved CRs per manager • Correlation with Customer Satisfaction surveys • Correlation between unresolved corrective issues and Availability/Reliability

Tips

• Find consensus in the decisions • Make Severity definition posters and leave them as decoration in CCB meeting rooms • Plan for 3 minutes per item (20/hour) • Follow up on decisions • Be organized, consistent and be on time • Ensure training : – supporting tools – supporting process • Publish updates of metrics to DE • Don’t forget the Hardware folks!

• Award effort on key members and engineers