A Tool for the Analysis of Change Management Processes in Software

Development Cycles

Mario P´erez

, Alvaro Navas

, Hugo A. Parada

and Juan C. Due˜nas

Center for Open Middleware, Universidad Polit´ecnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

Keywords:

Change Management Process, Software Release, Tools, RFC.

Abstract:

Change management processes theory speciﬁes the life cycle of a change through an organization. It is a well-

known process present in day-to-day operations, with up to hundreds of changes passing through its phases

each day. There is a broad range of tools that help with keeping track of each of those changes. However,

the use of these tools, and hence the process itself, is not always translated perfectly into an organization.

Therefore, it is necessary to analyse how the process has been implemented and how to correct it. Change

management systems often offer some degree of analysis, but it is either too little or too obtuse. In this paper

we present a tool that can help analyse the data gathered by these systems in order to detect bottle-necks and

irregularities in a visual way tailored to the special time needs of the data.

1 INTRODUCTION

Today, change management process is being adopted

by most IT organizations to manage continuous

change of customer requirements and technologies.

It is a well-deﬁned process by standards bodies such

ISO/IEC and ITIL which is considered a de facto stan-

dard (Lahtela and Jantti, 2011). Thus, organizations

are focused on customize their change process and

adopt a tool or change management system to trace

of each of those changes. These changes involve a set

of activities to plan, asses, approve, build, package,

test and deploysoftware in multiple environments and

with different technologies. Then changes takes place

in a complex scenario; and both managers and de-

velopers wish to make these activities light weighted

as possible by monitoring and improving the change

process. Therefore process managers require tools

provide information in order for change process to be

monitored, controlled, maintained and changed when

required.

Existing management systems provide mainly in-

formation to monitor the change process and to foster

collaboration among parts involved in change lifecy-

cle, but organizations also require information to ana-

lyze the process and then make decisions intended to

improve or change it. Thus in this work we focus on

analyze the change management process to determine

the useful information to detect bottlenecks and irreg-

ularities in a visual way tailored to the special time

needs of the data. Then make informed decisions in

order to modify or change the process.

Hence, in this paper we present an insdustrial

study case which use a graphic tool that allow man-

agers to better analize the temporal evolution of the

change management process by providing dynamic

information on it. We believe that graphical interface

makes easier detect loops or bottlenecks between dif-

ferent process stages.

The rest of this paper is organized as described

next. Section 2 describe brieﬂy some relevants works

related with our propossal. In section 3 describe the

too, it includes requirements it satisfy and the criteria

we used to desing it. Section 4 deals with the descrip-

tion of industrial case used; and ﬁnally in section 5

provides the conclusions and some entries about of

future works.

2 RELATED WORKS

Change management process starts tipically when a

request for change (RFC) is produced as a conse-

quence of ﬁxing a bug, updating a new software ver-

sion or satisfying a customer requirement. Then IT

organizations are permanently moving on change and

the need of process automation is felt such as is

pointed out by (Danesh, Amir Seyed and Saybani,

Mahmoud Reza and Danesh, Seyed Yahya Seyed).

As regards, in their work (Keller, A, 2011) propose

482

Pérez M., Navas Á., A. Parada H. and C. Dueñas J..

A Tool for the Analysis of Change Management Processes in Software Development Cycles.

DOI: 10.5220/0005468604820485

In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2015), pages 482-485

ISBN: 978-989-758-097-0

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

the automation of the change management process by

representing the RFC information as a task graph into

a set of steps and establishing how they will be car-

ried out. This work provides evidence about of how

graphic information on RFC helps to understand and

manage a complex process. In this sense the tool we

propose allows to any user understand the process by

processing the information produced by change man-

agement system, but it also allows traceability of RFC

which is one of the main challenges in change man-

agement process pointed out by (Lahtela and Jantti,

2011).

3 TOOL DESCRIPTION

This tool has been designed in order to make a graph-

ical analysis of the temporal evolution of change re-

quests. When studying change requests, it is difﬁcult

to detect abnormalities in their behavior if the analyst

is not using a graphical interface. So, for this rea-

son, it would not be possible to observe bottlenecks

or loops between different states.

On the other hand, this tool provides an evolutive

vision about a set of requests for change. Although

it is possible to perform an static analysis in a given

time, its main purpose is to show the temporal devel-

opment of an individual request or several requests.

3.1 Requirements: Analysis of RFC

Transitions and Times

The data used by this tool to analyze the processes is

read from a CSV format ﬁle, which has to be loaded

to the tool by the analyst. Besides, there is no need to

use a CSV ﬁle because the data could also be loaded

from a Change Management System or another data

source. The only requirement to be met is to provide

information about 5 ﬁelds:

• id: request identiﬁer.

• time: arrival time to a certain stage.

• durationtime: time the change request remains in

the stage.

• origin: request origin stage.

• destination: request destination stage.

These ﬁelds can be extended in order to provide

more information about the request for change that is

being analyzed. For instance, some extra ﬁelds could

be type or priority.

3.2 Tool Design

As can be seen in the ﬁgure 1, the graphical user

interface is divided into three parts. The central

area is the most important one because it shows

most of the information available at a glance. The

footer contains information about a certain selected

stage. There is also a left column which contains the

controls of the view.

Central Area. The purpose of this area is to show the

progress made by the RFC between different stages.

Due to the need to be a dynamic tool, it has been im-

plemented a slider that allows the user to move for-

ward or backward in the analysis period. Moreover a

progress bar has been placed under the slider because

the user needs to know the total time that an individual

request for change is in a certain stage. This progress

bar is used by the analyst when they are ﬁltering a

single RFC.

The starting time of the slider corresponds to the

ﬁrst RFC and the ending time corresponds to the last

RFC. Both are variable and depend on the data. With

this slider, the user can control the execution time to

inspect the progress of the change requests in detail.

Talking about the progress bar, it is possible to ﬁlter

and analyze a single RFC. As seen in ﬁgure 2, the

progress bar is showing the time of the ﬁltered RFC in

different colors depending on the stage. This progress

bar is only used when the analyst is ﬁltering a single

change request. This is a very important feature of the

tool because allows the user to check at a glance if a

RFC is in a certain stage during a lot of time just by

using colors. There is also a coloured table which has

been developed to complement the temporal progress

bar.

By using the colors the analyst is allowed to

use this tool in a more visual way, making easier

the process of analysing requests for change and

detecting bottlenecks and loops.

Footer. The footer area shows the information of the

simulation in a certain stage. These data are very

important for knowing the behaviour of a change re-

quest. As ﬁgure 1 shows, if the user clicks on a stage,

they will be able to view information about the re-

quests that are on it, which is shown in tables with

different columns. The ﬁrst one shows the id, priority

or type of a change request. The ﬁlter column shows

if the object is ﬁltered or not. The user can also tog-

gle the checkbox to ﬁlter or unﬁlter. This checkbox

makes the ﬁltering process easier. Furthermore, the

arrival time is the time a certain change request has

arrived to the selected stage. Finally, total duration

AToolfortheAnalysisofChangeManagementProcessesinSoftwareDevelopmentCycles

483

Figure 1: Tool overview.

Figure 2: Individual analysis.

ﬁeld shows the mean duration time of all of the re-

quests in the selected stage.

The footer provides valuable and important

statistical information about the analysis and without

it, this tool would only be a node network.

Left Column. The left column, which is composed

by different buttons and text areas, has three different

parts which are used in order to conﬁgure the simula-

tion and load data.

The purpose of the import and export data buttons

is to import and export the data in the format previ-

ously seen in 3.1. These buttons placed in the left

column interact with the tables in the footer. For in-

stance, if the user selects the id column the id table

will be shown.

Moreover, the visualizer allows the user to ﬁlter by

id, type and priority. For instance, if the user is ﬁlter-

ing by id with ”RFC123456”, the visualizer will just

show that RFC. When the user adds an item, a green

button will appear in order to show what the user is

ﬁltering. We have developed this because when the

analyst works with a huge amount of data, they can

simpliﬁcate the task by selecting an id or RFC prior-

ity.

Technology Used. We have used a Javascript based

library called Vis.js to draw the nodes and the con-

nections between them. Vis.js is a dynamic, browser

based visualization library which has been designed

to be easy to use and to handle large amounts of dy-

namic data. It is also possible to manipulate and in-

teract with the data with this library.

4 CONCLUSIONS

Monitoring, analyzing and improving the change pro-

cess is a difﬁcult task. Organizations need to make

decisions in order to improve their efﬁciency. For this

reason, we have presented in this paper a graphical

tool that helps companies to detect problems in the

change process.

It is possible to analyze the change management

process with this tool based on historical information

retrieved from logs. Through the use of this informa-

tion, the user is able to analyze useful data in order to

improve the change management process and detect

problems such as bottlenecks, loops, irregularities or

processes that are longer than necessary in one stage.

As the data contains information about each process

and its origin, destination, arrival time and duration

ICEIS2015-17thInternationalConferenceonEnterpriseInformationSystems

484

time, it is possible to know why, when and where the

error has been produced. These problems could not

be easily detected without using this tool.

One of the main advantages of this tool is that it

can import and analyze the information from various

sources. Not only from CSV ﬁles, but from whatever

data source that met with the requirements in 3.1. Fur-

thermore, it is possible to use the tool with any pro-

cess that has a source, a destination and a series of

nodes or states for a temporal analysis.

As a future work, it will be implemented various

new features to provide more statistical information,

apart from the automatic detection of bottlenecks or

loops. On the other hand, with a previous knowl-

edge of the maximum time that a process can be in

a certain stage, the analyst could detect automatically

which process does not satisfy the requirements.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to express their gratitude to

PRODUBAN who inspired and motivated this chal-

lenge as a real business case and provided all neces-

sary assistance to carry out this work.

REFERENCES

Lahtela, A. and Jantti, M. (2011). Challenges and prob-

lems in release management process: A case study. In

Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS),

2011 IEEE 2nd International Conference on. IEEE

pages 10-13

Danesh et al. (2011). Software release management chal-

lenges in industry: An exploratory study African

Journal of Business Management. Vol. 5, number 20,

pages 8050-8056

Keller, A. (2011). Automating the change management

process with electronic contracts E-Commerce Tech-

nology Workshops, 2005. Seventh IEEE International

Conference on. pages 99-107

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