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Quality

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This chapter describes Quality Management, the Quality screen, change requests, and patch requests.

Siebel Quality supports the product development and maintenance life cycle by managing change requests, or CRs. A change request (CR) is a formal report or recommendation aimed at correcting a defect in or adding an improvement to a product. Such products can include hardware, software, manufactured goods, and capital equipment. Siebel Quality can manage multiple types of change requests, including enhancement requests and product defect reports.

Siebel Quality supports the work of the various groups that use the change management process, such as quality assurance, development engineering, and product marketing.

Siebel Quality provides tools for creating, responding to, and tracking CRs. Siebel Quality manages CRs by doing the following:

Managing CRs from creation through resolution
Tracking and analyzing details about CRs
Coordinating and integrating CR management activities across multiple departments
Displaying status information on product stability

If a customer has an urgent need to resolve a CR and cannot wait for the next product release, Siebel Quality can generate a patch request, or PR. A patch request (PR) is a recommendation to create a maintenance release to implement a product defect fix or improvement.

Features of Siebel Quality

Siebel Quality operates through the Quality screen in your Siebel application. This section summarizes some features of Siebel Quality.

Create, track, and close the various types of CRs. These features allow an organization to manage a CR from beginning to the end, and also allow different process owners to manage specific phases of the CR life cycle.
Log, track, and resolve multiple occurrences of a CR. When an issue is found in one product, it sometimes occurs in other, related products. In such cases, end users can create child CRs, or multiple occurrence CRs, from a primary CR and link them together so that they can be managed as a single unit through resolution.

Siebel Quality also allows end users to designate other types of relationships, such as CRs that are dependent upon each other or are duplicates of each other.

Analyze and report on product issues. Because reports and charts are run on demand, organizations can gauge the overall health and stability of products in development.
Track the history of a CR. Siebel Quality displays information about who the CR was assigned to, whether ownership has been reassigned, and whether the product area associated with the CR has been modified.

Quality and Release Manager

Siebel Quality is packaged with Siebel Release Manager, a tool that allows an organization to manage product development through functions such as feature tracking, engineering allocation, test plan management, and test pass management.

Together, Quality and Release Manager support the product life cycle management process from beginning to end. For more information, see Release Manager.

Best Practices

The following section provides some best practices for administering and using the Quality functionality.

Assign CRs automatically. As a productivity aid, you can automate the CR assignment process. Use Siebel Business Process Designer to detect the creation of a new CR and invoke the Siebel Assignment Manager to assign this CR to the appropriate person.

For information about Siebel Business Process Designer, see Siebel Business Process Designer Administration Guide. For information about Siebel Assignment Manager, see Siebel Assignment Manager Administration Guide.

Link multiple occurrences. When the same issue occurs in different builds, testing environments, or platforms, you can link the CR records as multiple occurrences of each other. When you do this, it is possible to track multiple CRs together and close them together.
Appoint multiple owners. To help make sure of follow-up, assign at least two people to be involved in processing each CR. For example, one person may log, prioritize, and assign the CR while another person implements a solution.
Write descriptively. End users can help make the CR life cycle more efficient by writing clear and descriptive CRs that can be understood by everyone involved in CR processing.
Query frequently. Because the system does not automatically alert owners when a new CR has been logged or an existing one updated, end-users in all teams that work with CRs should query often for their CRs.
Add comments. To help the people involved in processing a CR to trace what has gone before and to understand what the current status is, make sure that everyone who updates a CR writes a comment describing the update.

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