Reporting on Requirements Approval needs to be automated; Review Status should be clear

Razvan Costea-Barlutiu
edited September 2016 in
Hello,

We work in healthcare industry and one of our reasons for using Jama is auditability of requirements, including the approval process.

I can't seem to find a way to show anything related to the approval process in the requirements view, once the approval process has been completed.

From one of your videos describing the review center, it appears that the only way I can have some kind of a report is by generating one on a review that's still open. 
What if the review is closed? Do I lose my ability of knowing who approved an item and when?

Seems to me like this is missing basic functionality and I fear that it's me that I am missing something obvious. 

To summarize, here's what I want to do:

1. review a bunch of requirements. Add comments, approve, all the good stuff.
2. have a way to pull up, at any time, a report on a specific requirement describing its review process.

Right now these two appear to be disconnected. What am I missing? I greatly appreciate any guidance you may offer.

Comments

  • Markus Vehmanen
    edited November 2015
    Hi,

    We also work in the healthcare industry and have similar needs. Just to give my 2 cents: We have a dropdown attribute for the items we review. It has few options for value, which are: 

    - Draft (When it's not ready)
    - Ready for review (...)
    - Approved (Items that have been approved in the review, review moderator bulk updates these to have this value)
    - Rejected (Items that haven't been approved in the review and will not be immediately edited so that they can be approved OR items that will never be approved).

    So basically it's a bit of manual labour for us at the moment.
  • Sebastian Theiß
    edited June 2016
    Razvan, you are addressing a real good point. I see two possible workarounds:

    1. Open the "Activities" tab and check for statements like "This item was reviewed in REV-221 V3." and check the signatures of the review in the "Baselines" tab or open the review itself in the review center.

    2. (That is what we are doing for assessments. However, it is a little bit old-fashioned.) Use a "component" as folder for a specification document including introduction and version history. We are storing the Review-ID in the version history. Furthermore, we are doing a manual workflow transition to "released" including a comment like "released after review of revision 02" (see also Markus' answer). This comment also shows up in the "Activities" tab of the item.

    However, these workaround doesn't solve the problem. I think JAMA should switch this to an "Idea" as it is a real good point. Is it possible to track the review status for single items more efficient? E.g. by adding a notification of a finished review to the item's "Activities (maybe including the names of approvers/reviewers that have agreed/disagreed)?

    Regards,
    Sebastian
  • Razvan Costea-Barlutiu
    edited August 2015
    Thank you both for your comments and suggestions.
    Sebastian - your last paragraph is precisely what I need.

    I am somewhat baffled that there is such a cool implementation of a requirements review (kudos for that!) but those reviews appear to disappear (sic!) in the void.

    I would find it extremely counterproductive to tell our auditors that in order to find who approved what I need to dig into the design history file for all the review meetings (we have one per week) and find what I need.
  • Angela Southworth
    edited August 2015
    We use the signature on the baseline that was created at the time the review is created. We also use a field for requirement status (initial draft, pending review, final review, approved, etc) that we manually update (which also triggers our integration with Jira. However, as everyone has commented thus far, this is a manual process and there is a disconnect/gap. It's a manual review of the baselines to insure every item has been included in a review and that nothing was overlooked.
  • Steve A.
    edited August 2015
    I agree that this is an important missing attribute of any item.  Meaning it is needed not only for Requirements but other artifacts such as Test Cases.
  • Steve A.
    edited August 2015
    Has anyone tried to use the Review Center workflow for this?  On the surface, it appears to be a way to accomplish the desired outcomes in this post:image
  • Angela Southworth
    edited September 2016
    We have not used the workflows. Last I knew there was a BUG tied to the workflow that would cause issues for us. Not sure if that BUG has been fixed or not as we have not yet revisited.
  • swoo Woo
    edited September 2016
    Hi Angela,

    I could be wrong, I think you may be referring to SOS-BUG-845, which is fixed on the hosted version last Sat. I assume it will be fixed for the next on-premise release by the end of the year. The release note is https://community.jamasoftware.com/jama/topics/jama-saas-hosted-release-notes

    My company also has not used workflow yet but have began exploration.

    swoo 
  • Kristina King
    edited June 2016
    Angie, I'm not sure if the bug you're referring to is SOS-BUG-467, but if it is, that one has not yet been fixed. 

    So Steve—the review center workflow is definitely worth exploring. However, because of SOS-BUG-467, you cannot enable it if you utilize normal Workflow. If you have normal Workflow enabled, the RC workflow will not work.
  • Kristina King
    edited June 2016
    Sebastian, I definitely agree with you there. I'll update this to an Idea. I agree with you, Markus, Razvan, Steve and Angie that while there is a way to show this info (manual work), that is not ideal, especially when we're talking compliance—the more automation, the better.