Change Requests

A change request proposes a set of edits to the model, explains why, and waits for approval before anything changes. Use change requests for configuration control: once requirements are approved or a baseline is set, changes go through a request that the project's approvers review. Change requests are under Plan & Deliver → Change Requests.

How to use it

Create a change request

1. Open Plan & Deliver → Change Requests and click New Change Request, or click Propose Change… on an item under configuration control.
2. Give it a Title and a Reason: why the change is needed and what it should achieve.
3. Add the Affected Items. Holarch lists the items traced to them (requirements, tests, interfaces and other related items); add the ones that change too.

Stage the changes

1. Click Add Change ▾ and choose what to propose: Change an Item… (number, name, description or one attribute), New Item…, Delete an Item…, Add a Relationship… or Remove a Relationship….
2. Each staged change is listed under Proposed Changes, with a word diff for description changes. Nothing changes in the model yet.
3. Remove a staged change with Remove.

Submit, review and approve

1. Click Submit for Review. On the hosted service the approvers get a notice and an entry under My Work → Change requests to decide.
2. An approver opens the request, checks the proposed changes and clicks Approve… or Reject… (a rejection needs a reason).
3. When the request has the number of approvals the project requires, its status becomes Approved. One rejection rejects it; the author can then edit the changes and submit again.

Apply the changes

1. An editor or owner opens the approved request and clicks Apply Changes.
2. All staged changes are applied together as one undo step. Each changed item's history records the change "via CR-12".
3. Changes whose items were deleted in the meantime are skipped and listed with the result.

Status

Configuration control

In Settings on the Change Requests page, a project owner can turn on Changes to approved and baselined items require a change request. Then:

• Approved requirements (Status Approved) and items in the latest project baseline can no longer be edited, deleted or linked directly. Holarch explains why and points to change requests.
• Comments, reviews, requirement approvals, quality results and suspect-link flags stay open.
• Approved change requests apply their changes to these items.

Approvals and approvers

• Approvals required: 1, 2 or 3.
• Who approves: project owners, owners and editors, or a change board of named project members (hosted service).
• Authors may approve their own change requests: off by default.

On the hosted service, Holarch uses only settings that a project owner saved; settings changed by anyone else are ignored and the defaults apply (owners approve, one approval, not their own requests).

Approval records

On the hosted service, approving or rejecting asks for your password (once per 10 minutes) and records who decided, when, the note and the exact staged changes the vote applies to. If the staged changes are edited after a vote, that vote no longer counts and the approvers are asked again. Before changes are applied, the server checks that the request is approved with its current changes.

Comments, notices and the log

• Comments on a change request work like comments on items.
• On the hosted service, notices go to the approvers when a request is submitted, to the author when it is approved or rejected, and to the author and voters when it is applied or withdrawn.
• Each request keeps a History of what happened, by whom and when.
• Export ▾ on the Change Requests page saves the change request log as Excel (.xlsx) or Word (.docx), with each request's changes and history.