Feature: Dependency Management
We believe that dependency management is at least 50% of the battle when dealing with non-trivial projects. As the saying goes,
"You cannot eliminate complexity, all you can do is move it around"
If you do not have a system to capture and manage the dependencies and relationships among your project data, then you are relying on the mental heroics of the project team members to keep everything straight in their heads, and detect non-obvious side-effects when change happens mid-stream in your project.
That's a pretty tall order.
This is why ProjectPipe makes it easy to establish and manage the dependencies and other relationships among your project data. With ProjectPipe, you can easily:
- Associate Requirements back to the Use Cases
- Tie Test Cases to Use Cases and Requirements, to ensure that you have adequate QA coverage
- Link Issues back to the underlying requirements
- Identify any Requirements that conflict with the Scope Document
- Map the fulfillment of business rule Requirements onto the proposed architecture of your solution
- Map project plan Tasks to Requirements, so that you can see when the requirements of the solution are met over time
Creating a Link
From any item in ProjectPipe, simply click "Add New Link". This will bring up a screen where you can select the type of item that you wish to link to. For larger projects, you can filter by name as well.
Once you've identified the item you wish to link to, click the "Add" link. This will bring up another screen where you can specify the details of the relationship.
ProjectPipe allows for a number of types of link relationships, such as :
- Requires - Traditional dependency
- Exists because of - Downstream or side-effect relationship
- Implements - Used when linking a UI prototype to a Use Caseor Requirement
- Breaks - Used to flag conflicting elements, such as two requirements which contradict each other
You can also add a description to provide additional commentary on the link or relationship, as shown below:
This simple and flexible mechanism allows the members of your project team to quickly and easily document and categorize all of the relationships among your project data.