You can use plans to manage work items within
the context of fixed development periods within a project. You can
create a plan overview, create and modify work items assignments for
team members, track the progress of the work that is committed for
the iteration, and create additional documentation. Rational Team Concert™ projects
are organized into a series of fixed-length development periods called
iterations. Each timeline has its own set of iterations. Timeline,
iterations, start and end dates, and the current iteration designation
are defined in the project area overview Process Iterations list.
Plans are composed of a set of work items. Changes to the plan
are reflected in the work items; for example, new entries in the plan
create new work items. Changes in work item are reflected in the plan;
for example, when a work item is closed, that status is reflected
in the plan. This keeps the plan synchronized with current project
activity and minimizes the need for redundant documentation. The
plan structure is also flexible. You can group the work items in the
plan predefined or user-defined plan modes. Plans are accessible to
all team members in the Team Artifacts view in the project's Plans
folder.
You can use the plan editor to manage three kinds of information:
- General information for the plan, such as important dates, high-level
dependencies to other components, objectives, test plans, and other
unstructured content. This information can be documented on the Overview page
and additional pages using wiki syntax for text formatting. You can
include links to work items and queries on these pages.
- The actual work in terms of work items planned for an iteration.
Planning the work is done using the Planned Items page.
You can modify all the attributes of a work item.
- Progress information to determine if the team is on schedule to
meet the committed objectives.
- The plan progress can be tracked using the progress bars in the
plan editor heading and on the group headings on the Planned
Items page.
- The Charts page shows how progress evolved
over the duration of the iteration.