LivePlan – Managing Changes

One problem of many plans is that they become outdated as soon as you are confronted with changes inside your project. What I like about Polarion is that you can embrace change. Change happens and change is good. Better to adjust the product and face the impact of changes than delivering the wrong product. The main difference to the initial planning process is that we have already an existing plan into which we have to squeeze in new features, bugs and change requests.

In our example we have a simple three step process:

1. Change request/bug arrives and is reviewed


2. Analyze impact, estimate, prioritize and assign


3. Reschedule according to new situation

Change request/bugarrives and is reviewed

As long as the change request has no assignee it will appear at the bottom of the plan. We could interpret the bottom bar as a representation of the project’s backlog ? all open issues qued one after another

Analyze impact, estimate, prioritize and assign

We analyze the impact and decide to implement the change. This step requires to set an assignee, priority, estimate and a timepoint to define when the change should be implemented. If it is a bug that has to be implemented at once we give it highest priority.

This information will be enough for polarion to update the plan – now including the new bug.According to the priorities we have set it will appear as first item to be implemented. Unfortunately this has an impact on our plan. We see that some of the features (marked in red) will be delayed.

Reschedule according to new situation

Now it is time to adjust our plan according to the new situation. We may react in two ways. One possibility is to move the milestones that are affected.

The other option we have is to keep our milestone but reassign some other items that won’t make to the milestone because of the unexpected bugfix.

Managing changes in your project will happen quite regularily. But as you can see above it is not complex. The important thing is that you have to keep control on the impact of a change. The liveplan of polarion will help you to control your changes as you will get an up-to-date information on what is going on in your project.