Polarion^® ALM Platform Feature Overview

Polarion ALM provides a comprehensive feature set that fully supports the application lifecycle from inception of requirements through coding, building, and testing. This page provides you an overview of the key feature areas. Some features may not be present in all Polarion ALM products.

Next-generation Requirements Management
"Live ALM" Dashboards, Audits & Metrics
"Live Plan" Project Planning
Change Management
Reporting
Build Management
Time Tracking and Reporting
Team Collaboration & Communication
Process Compliance Support
Administration, Process and Controls
Repository - Configuration Management, System Requirements & Architecture

View Feature Matrix >>

The Feature Matrix can be found in our free witepaper Why Polarion ALM Enterprise? - available in the downloads area.

Next-generation Requirements Management

Polarion raises the bar for state-of-the-art Requirements Management! Requirements engineers and domain experts can create hierarchies of requirements on line with the graphical Requirements Designer, or work with Microsoft Office^® tools (Word and Excel) using special templates that sync with the Requirements Designer. Requirements can also be written in the integrated Wiki. Requirements can be linked to tests and tasks for end-to-end traceability. Polarion facilitates approvals with customizable workflow and/or one-click approval by assigned Approvers.

Once Requirements are defined, Engineering teams can manage the implementation in the data-driven type of environment they need.

"Live ALM" Dashboards, Audits & Metrics

Polarion provides for managers real-time visibility for single projects, to project groups, on up to corporate level. Configure to deliver the most relevant information for different projects.

Overview topic - get a high level, at-a-glance roll-up of key information for one project or all projects
Dasboard topic - rolls up key project statistics to show the current status, progress, and more
Quality topic - centralizes all information about software quality including audits & metrics:
- Metric categories:
  - Quality
  - Reuse
  - Time
- Audit categories
  - Source code
  - Process compliancy
Drill down capability from corporate overview down to single source file
Recognition of re-useable and re-used components

"Live Plan" Project Planning

Polarion also raises the bar for state-of-the-art Project Planning! Project managers spend their time managing resources and monitoring progress rather than feeding a project planning tool.

With Polarion, you concentrate on project planning and estimating. Set up project dates and milestones, estimate time needed for each task, assign tasks to the team, then sit back and let Polarion generate the GANTT chart (which also takes into account linked tasks, even if those are from another project). You immediately understand if the project is feasible with the resources and time you have, and you can see which resources are over or under utilized. Nice, but that's not the truly exciting part.

As the project gets under way, the project's Live Plan is updated automatically in real time as developers work on and close tasks. No more guessing about progress and status - you know. As the inevitable bottlenecks appear, you spot them right away and take corrective steps before things reach critical mass. What's more, your developers stay focused and productive because they don't need to spend time on status reports or meetings.

Change Management (Issue Tracking)

Polarion includes a fully-integrated, full-featured, customizable tracker. Manage requirements, change requests, bugs/defects, and tasks. Includes customizable workflow and robust time planning and reporting.

Customizable Work Item (artifact) types
Template support for all kinds of artifacts (projects,
bugs, feature requests, change requests, tasks)
User-definable Work Item fields (custom fields)
Customizable Workflow
Link Work Items with relationships (parent, dependency, etc.)
Link Work Items to revisions (manually, or automatic on SVN commits)
Customizable views on Work Items
Lucene-based queries, visual query builder, reusable queries
Versioned attachments
Customizable notifications
Complete, searchable history
Robust web interface, uniform user experience
Online and offline modes available support geographically dispersed teams
All artifacts tracked in underlying SVN repository
Integrated with Project Planning features

Reporting

Polarion provides detailed visibility into all distributed development activities for all project stakeholders (developers, project managers, QA, customers).

Customizable reports over all artifacts, such as
requirements, bugs, tasks, projects and source code
Status, progress and trend reports
Build status monitoring
User defined work items for Monitoring and Notification
CMMI report helps assess state of maturity model compliance
Work Time reports

Build Management

Polarion takes also care of building your Java applications. Builds and other repeating work can be scheduled.

Out of the box build management and support for Maven 2, Ant and Eclipse builds
Server-based build engine
Monitoring
Customizable scheduling and jobs
Comprehensive build reports including changed resources

Process Compliance Support

Polarion ALM provides live assessment reports that enable manages to understand the current level of compliance with:

CMMI Level 2
XP (Extreme Programming)

Time Management & Reporting

Polarion ALM uses the timeboxing model enabling sophisticated management and tracking of time spent on Work Items.

Fully integrated with project Live Plan
Timepoints
Work Reports
Single or Multiple Work Item Assignee with cumulative work reporting
Estimated Time and Time Spent tracking
Analysis of planning accuracy over time

Team Collaboration & Communications

Polarion ALM has several features that support collaboration and communication among distributed team members.

Comment thread – for collaboration/discussion at the Work Item level
Integrated Wiki – for collaboration/discussion at the project and global (repository) levels
Attachments – attach any type of file to Work Items; update existing attachments
Hyperlinking – Work Items to internal or external resources

Administration, Process and Controls

Polarion features fine grained role based access controls and configurable best practice process/workflow.

Sophisticated rights and permission system from application down to single field
Role concept including user group support
Backbone for faster adoption of CMMI maturity level 2 and 3
Project templates for fast ramp-up
Role-based views
Free configurable attributes with dependencies and extensible data type system

Repository - Configuration Management, System Requirements & Architecture

Polarion provides customers with a central repository to store all project information (artifacts) like change requests, bugs, resources, tasks, issues, code, documents, e-mails. Repository is based on Subversion which is also used for configuration management.

Baselining over all artifacts
All artifacts including. history in one SCM System
Support of WebDAV/DeltaV standard
Open architecture for integration with existing tools and systems
Multi-repository capability (geographic distribution of resources)
Centralized IP repository with firewall and access control security
Easy backup and archiving functionality

Polarion is built on Eclipse with open API and XML support to allow easy integration and adoption in different enterprises.

Client Software:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 + Adobe Flash Player
Mozilla Firefox 1.x + Adobe Flash Player

Server platforms:

Windows 2000, NT, XP
Windows Server 2003
RedHat Linux
SuSE Linux
Debian Linux

Polarion is tested and supported on the above Linux platforms, but may well run on others.

Polarion® ALM Platform Feature Overview