Widget for Polarion: Approval Progress

With Polarion you have to option to use approvals to check if requirements are correct. This can be stakeholder requirements received from a customer that need to be checked wheter your company can fulfill them.

Blog by Martin Bron.

ready to work with approval progress widget?

Preamble

Polarion offers approval workflows to validate your requirements – whether they're stakeholder requirements from customers that need feasibility checks, or internal requirements that must pass through your compliance processes. But managing these can be tricky and cumbersome.

The problem many teams face? Managing these approvals with complex reports or custom scripts that break with every small change. Good news: there's a more reliable way.

For whom this could be interesting

Are you working ofter with approvals, but would like to elevate this to the next level?
Are you working with external stakeholders (f.e. you are a Tier 1 and working together with an OEM) and receive a lot of requirements at once that you need to review in a short period (f.e. need to improve your Time to Offer) and the review needs to be tracked and transparent?
Are you working with larger teams with multiple people with the same or similar expertise, but don't want to micromanage them?
Would you like to have a report to present the status of the approvals for features, documents, departments, personnel, …?
Are you in need to be able to have an agile approach for the approval process?
Is your team changing members on a regular basis?
Do you want the requirement status to reflect the approval state?
Do you want to easier (and thus faster) track changes within the approval state?

Using the approval progress widget is as easy as 1,2,3:

Add the widget to a live report page. Configure the settings of the widget (no scripting needed).
Instead of assigning persons to the requirement, you set attributes corresponding to their tasks.
Load the report page on regular intervals, take actions corresponding to findings of the widget.

Finding that could be found with corresponding reactions: see image

No discipline set; Requirements engineer (or other responsible) needs to review the requirements to set the attributes so the widget knows who should review.

Approval missing: Attributes are set, but the user is not yet assigned. Follow the missing requirements for that user and assign them:

Waiting: The approver(s) need to review and set the approvals
Partially approved: Same as waiting, but there is at least 1 other reviewer that already set the approval to Approved. Only applicable for when multiple approvers are needed for a requirement (f.e. when Software and System both need to check the same requirement)
Approved: All necessary approvers have set the requirement to approved. With 2 approvers with the same configuration, it can be set that only 1 of them is needed. So it can be displayed here as approved, even though not every approver have set the status to approved.
Disapproved: A necessary approver has disapproved a requirement.
Is disapproved by different department: Requirement is disapprover by somebody that wasn’t required to review the requirement. This can be investigated separately.

Action reacting to a change of approval state:

example of some available views

these can be adjusted

Screenshot are made with test data. To have the full experience please contact us.

Afterword by Martin

I have started working on this widget while I was active as a requirements engineer for a Tier 1 automotive company. We would get many stakeholder requirements (around 10.000 per product) that needed to be reviewed by a dedicated team. Back then, I quickly realized the limitations of the standard approvals within Polarion. To manage all this and to keep track of the reviews that have been performed, I created this overview. And kept it relatively flexible with what is presented. The project manager started using this page to keep track on the review process. While I kept using it to keep everything up to date and to know what needed to be done. My performance was higher than my coworkers. So they all took this over as well. When we needed to pass on information back to the OEMS, this page was also used more often to give them indications of our process. After using it successfully for stakeholder requirements, we also started using this for all other requirements. The concept has been proven to work.