HCL Compass Agile schema

You can use the Compass Agile schema to follow agile project practices and product managers to track the project's progress.

Agile teams, or an organization of agile teams, can use the Agile schema to track agile work items for a project with Compass.

Project, Components, Releases, Sprints

The Project record is the centerpiece of the agile process. You can define a Project for each agile team, or you could define a project for each product or solution you develop. You can further break a project into Components. For example, you could create a Project for your new mobile app and define Components in your Project for the REST API service, mobile application, back-end, etc. How you define these will depend on how you want to organize your team or teams. Do you want one agile team for each component?

The output of the Project, applications, or solutions must be released to consumers at some point. You can define any number of Release records representing a fixed setup functionality and improve other work needed to deliver the release. A Release record has a name, a description, and a release type.

An agile team will work in time-boxed increments. You can create Sprint records and add them to the Project. Sprint records have a name (choose something descriptive enough to make it unique but short enough to be consumable), a start date, and an end date.

You can configure certain aspects of the agile process in the Project record. You can choose valid values for:
  • Work Item Types – Default list of types is Defect, Epic, Story, and Task. Maybe you want to add new types, like TestActivity, to track testing work? Perhaps you want to add Design Thinking types such as Hills, Subhills, and Scenarios?
  • Release Types – The default list of types is Alpha, Beta, ReleaseCandidate, GA.
  • Story Points – The default list of story points follows the modified Fibonacci.
  • Priorities – The default list of priorities is 1 – High, 2 – Medium, 3 – Minor. If you add more preferences, note that the list gets sorted alphanumerically, so if you put a number in front, it will ensure it gets sorted correctly.
  • Severity – Such as priorities, you should include a number upfront to specify how you want it sorted.
  • Administrators – You can add users who you want to be able to make changes to the project and its associated records.

Work Items

Work needs to get done, or the releases never happen. You can create WorkItem records in the Agile schema to track this work. Rather than define a particular record type for each kind of work item, this schema has a single record type with a field to specify the type of work item. The type is limited to whatever types you define on the Project.

The fields you would typically expect on a work item are there. A title, a description, a priority, a severity, owner, etc. You can also link work items to other work items. There are two kinds of work item relationships supported. The first is a parent/child relationship. You might have an Epic work item that is a parent of several Story work items. Some of those Story work items may have Task work items as children. Use the parent/child relationship for this.

The other type of relationship between work items is a generic one to indicate some form of relationship. For example, if one Story has some work related to another Story, you could link them together this way.

Work items need to get “done, done”, so they must be planned. For a work item, you can plan it for a sprint, add story points, set effort, and “effort done”.

Permissions

The permissions for the Agile schema are simple, but a schema designer can customize them through hooks.

Out of the box, the permissions are as follows:
  1. Anyone can create any record type.
  2. Only the owner or admins of a Project can modify it.
  3. Only the owner or admins of a Project can add/remove a Release, Sprint, or Component to/from it.
  4. If a Release, Sprint, or Component has been added to a Project, only the owner or admins of the Project can change it.
  5. If a Release, Sprint, or Component has been added to multiple Projects, any of the owners or admins of those Projects can change it.
  6. Anyone can create a WorkItem and assign it to any Project.

While a Release, Sprint, or Component can be added to multiple projects, it would be better for each Project to have its own.