Change Control Boards and

Release Planning

Presented by Alicia Iwaniw

AGENDA

• Definitions• Reasons for having a CCB process• Who are the drivers• Process• Type of CCBs• Supporting tools• Metrics • Tips

Definitions

• CCB: Group of appropriate people who meet periodically, analyze change requests for consistency, review changes in a project, assign champions to implement corrective actions, monitor progress, check closures.

• Release Planning: Meetings held periodically to review the business integrity of a project/product release. The release planning takes under consideration the customer, marketing and financial issues and communicates via CCB meetings the urgency of a

problem resolution.

Reasons for having a CCB process

• The CCB process is required to ensure schedule and business commitments for planned releases.

• Controlled process to estimate Impact of changes

• Communication that authorizes changes to a baseline release

Who are the drivers

• CCB Coordinator

• Quality

• Requirements

• Product architect

• Software

• Hardware

• Test / Integration

• Project Management

• Requestors / Petitioners

New CRs approval Process

RequestEntry

CCB Coordinatorreviews Request

Core TeamReviews Requests

E-Approved?

Y

N

Assign andstart cookingthe solution

ScheduleCCB Mtg.

Impactneeded

?

N

Y

ImpactAnalysis

ImpactAnalysis

ImpactAnalysis

CCB meeting

ApproveRequests

?N

Y

Doc.WhyRejected.

Type of CCBs

Infrastructure SubscriberInputs

Solutions

Supporting tools

• Rational Software Defect tracking tool: ClearDDTS

• QSS requirements tool: DOORS• Internally developed scripts for

reports and metrics generation.

Metrics

• CR lifecycle based on severities• No. of CRs per release• Closure Rate• Unresolved CRs per manager• Correlation with Customer Satisfaction

surveys• Correlation between unresolved

corrective issues and Availability/Reliability

Tips

• Find consensus in the decisions• Make Severity definition posters and leave them as

decoration in CCB meeting rooms• Plan for 3 minutes per item (20/hour)• Follow up on decisions• Be organized, consistent and be on time• Ensure training :

– supporting tools– supporting process

• Publish updates of metrics to DE• Don’t forget the Hardware folks!• Award effort on key members and engineers