A request in Serena® Dimensions® CM represents a change request made against a product or part of a product. It may capture a defect, enhancement, or other work that needs to be completed on items that belong to the product.
Dimensions CM can be configured to use requests, or issues or defects as they may be called, from another IDM (Issue Defect Management) tool external to Dimensions CM. These issues can then be used to relate to item revisions in order to track changes. See About Item Relationships for further details. This chapter describes Dimensions CM internal requests and how to use the features available for them.
You can use requests to plan, track, authorize, and control all work on the product.
For each type of request, the process model includes:
A project-organization-specific layout and format.
System-defined and user-defined attributes.
Rules on behavior and relationships between request types and item types.
A lifecycle that maps the organization's process for handling the request type.
In the web client and desktop client you can perform the following change management tasks:
Create a new request.
Relate requests to items, baselines, other requests, and design parts.
Relate an item to a request.
Edit request attributes.
Add an action description to a request, or edit an existing description.
Add attachments to requests, or edit an existing attachments list.
Action a request to remove it from your Inbox.
Delegate or request ownership of a request to or from another Dimensions CM site.
Move a request to a different design part.
Preview and print the contents of a request.
View the action history and revision history of a request.
View the users, roles, and privileges for a request.
NOTE You can also merge the changes associated with a request into a stream, for details see Merging Changes across Streams.