You can use requests to plan, track, authorize, and control all work on the product. A request may capture a defect, enhancement, or other work that needs to be completed on items that belong to the product.
The fundamental concept of managing work with requests is the association of requests to files that you are working on. Follow this process to manage your work with requests:
If you organization requires request associations for all work, do not start any work that is not related to a request. You may be unable to deliver your changes to the Dimensions repository without associating your files with requests.
Before starting work, identify the requests that you will work on and add them to your working list. You can use requests that other users have already created, or you can create new request.
Associate the appropriate issues from your working list to files when checking them out, or when checking them in.
The requests then store a record of all affected files. This provides detailed tracking history. Furthermore, the requests can be used for other purposes such as creating baselines of revisions that were created in response to them.
You can work with Dimensions requests, or with Serena Business Manager requests.
The Dimensions for Eclipse Plug-in simplifies the process of administering requests. You can perform the most frequent tasks, such as actioning a request through its lifecycle or delegating the request to a developer. You can action a request to its next lifecycle state, or any other valid state in the request's lifecycle. Normal Dimensions CM rules only allow transitions that are valid. After the next state has been selected, you can choose to delegate the request to a particular role. Requests that you action are placed in the Inbox of the relevant users.
Where a role has multiple potential users, you can identify the specific users that will receive the request. This allows team leaders to monitor and reassign work as necessary to maintain and improve team productivity.
Dimensions can be configured to manage requests using the Issue Defect Management (IDM) solution for Serena Business Manager. If your organization uses IDM to manage defects, issues, and change requests, you can complete all work in your IDE in context of related Business Manager requests.
Serena IDM must be established as the default provider for requests in order to use it within Eclipse. Your administrator can do this from the Dimensions Administration Console. For detailed instructions, see the Serena Dimensions Process Modeling User’s Guide.