Octopus Project Management

Vision

Octopus is a federated, distributed Project Managment System which supports cross-company project realisation with minimal administration.

Mission

The requirements for a complete coverage of a project management have been rising during the last several years due to the distributed character of nowadays software development and the integration of outsourcing into the development process.

Octopus provides an effective and goal oriented project management by making a distributed development process as transparent as possible. The extensive management of all project artifacts exceeds the normal versioning of documents by saving all communication streams of the decision process within a project, covering notices, telefon and video conferences and sketches.

Strategy

The main characteristics which enables Octopus to reach its goal are:

Federated: content- and user-management is done per site. The visibility and access between sites can be controlled fine grained via policies.

Scalable: Octopus supports from small projects with minimal overhead to company scale projects with multiple sites in different countries.

Flexible: the development process can be determined per site. The actual project management process like waterfall, RUP, XP or Scrum is implemented in our process engine and can be flexible adopted to the actual needs. Different process models on different sites can be synchronised with each other.

Extensible: parts of Octopus are accessible through an API. This API provides the possibility to extend Octopus functionality with plugins.

Simple: Octopus is designed according to the principal of least surprise. The basic usage and administration can be learned within an hour.

Robust: One benefit of Octopus is its robustness. No crash leads to lost data, no misuse lets the system crash and all actions are reversable.

A brief Description of Octopus

In principal every project can be managed with Octopus, it is not restricted to software development.

Projects are following a certain workflow. During this workflow a broad spectrum of artifacts are produced on which decisions are based which steer the development process. Because even small projects nowadays are not restricted to a single site any more it becomes crucial to save and manage all communication streams within a project to keep the decision making transparent.

Octopus provides the possibillity of a cross-site project management where each site keeps its independence but gets integrated into the overall project management process. Data like crucial project parameter and information for forecasts, analysis and monitoring of the project are exchanged according to a policy which grants access to users of the partner site. This enables the overall project management the early recognition of bottlenecks and project risks.

Data exchange and access between different project sites are controlled by a Policy Enforcement Point. Here the visibility of artifacts and access to project ressources can be granted to each other.

More and more flexible workflows gain importance in project management and agile methods are also used to run enterprise grade projects. To allow for a flexible project management which can always be altered according to the actual project needs, Octopus is driven by a Business Process Engine (BPE) which comes with predefined processes for the most common methods like waterfall, RUP, XP or Scrum. Via synchonisation point, like milestones, different processes on different development sites can be mapped on each other.

External systems like source or incident management as well as extensions to Octopus can be integrated by plugins. Likewise Octopus can be accessed through a Web-Service and be integrated as service into a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Octopus USPs

In the following we want to point out the main Unique Selling Propositions of Octopus.

Distributed Project Management

Octopus enables you to manage projects which are not only distributed all over the world but which also cross company boundaries.

Decision Management

Octopus manages all artifacts in a simple and clearly arranged way. This makes decisions transparent and provides comprehensive justifications for each decision.

Risk Management

Good Risk Management is of central importance for the successful accomplishment of a project. Octopus supports several risk estimation methods which cover the quality and quantity of the influence of identified risks and documents and traces the measures taken to mitigate them.

Calculations

The basis of all successful projects is a realistic calculation for the project. The Octopus estimation sheets are highly customizable and have shown their value in many successful projects. All parameters of a project can be gathered and together with the risk estimation it is possible to prepare an all-embracing compilation of all costs and prices.

Requirements Management

The shortest path from an idea to a product lead by a detailled documentation of the requirements of a project. The gathering, versioning and documentation of requirements is only one part of Octopus Requirements Management capability. The relationship of decisions and requirements and their documentation over time makes the influence of changes on costs and timeframe of a project transparent. This facilitates the coordination with your customer.

Test Management

Besides the normal management of tests like code and test coverage, regression test steering and statistics it is possible to generate a primary test catalogue automatically from the requirements. Further an approval catalogue for the final acceptance test of the customer can be generated directly from the test catalogue.

Contract and Change Management

To get a complete overview of the project situation it is important to have access to all contract relevant documents related to the project. Integrated in the Contract Management is the Change Management of Octopus because of its tight relationship to the contracting situation.

With help of a Change Workflow each incoming Change Request is analysed to see if the changes are implementable within the current contract situation or if the Change Request has to be covered by an extension to the original contract. For each Change Request its influence on the project plan and the customer agreement are documented.

Contact Information

The Octopus Software is our main project at the moment and still under development. If you are interested in the project or have special needs and would like to know if they will be covered by Octopus, feel free so send us an eMail.

Responsible Manager: Stephan Maurer