Design Parts

A design part is an object that represents some conceptual component of the system. Each design part owns a set of items associated with that part of the product, such as a functional specification document, a test specification, or source code files.

Design parts are organized into a design part structure by defining hierarchical relationships between them. Such relationships can be used to express the organization of your development project to Dimensions CM, providing a structure in which you can assign roles and responsibilities to specific users. Grouping items within a meaningful design part structure makes it easier for users to understand how things fit together and what role they have to play in the success of the development project.

Dimensions CM has two predefined types of relationship between design parts, breakdown and usage.

Breakdown relationships describe ownership of a design part by another design part. Each design part has a parent that is defined when you create it. Dimensions CM uses breakdown relationships to determine the inherited responsibilities for the items or requests associated with a particular design part segment.

Usage relationships express dependencies between design parts, to show where design parts are reused in the design structure.

Design parts follow a fixed system-defined lifecycle called LC_PART. You cannot assign user-defined lifecycles to design parts.

Example: PAYROLL Product

For example, the BONUS and HOLIDAY design parts are children of the APPLICATIONS design part. These design parts are in a breakdown relationship with APPLICATIONS. This means that team members with roles on APPLICATIONS will inherit the roles on BONUS and HOLIDAY, unless the same roles are assigned to other users on these lower level design parts.

In this example, Will and Sarah inherit the DEVELOPER role on BONUS but do not on HOLIDAY, since Adam is assigned the DEVELOPER role on that design part.

Design Part Variants

A design part variant represents an alternative implementation of a design part. Typically a variant represents a specific market requirement or demand. For example, a team might develop a product that has two different markets, American and European. To represent those markets, the team creates a set of design part variants specific to each market.

You can create variants at any level within the product structure. A variant will appear at the same level as its parent design part.

Example: Variants in the PAYROLL Product

The illustration below shows a simple set of design part variants that represent European (V1) and American (V2) markets. As shown, Dimensions CM allows you to:

- Create variants of the same design parts: APPLICATIONS, TAX

- Use common design parts: BONUS

- Create new design parts specific to a variant: 401K and W4