OSLC Reporting

Introduction

The goal of this effort is to define a common set of features that RESTful services should implement to enable reporting. Reporting is an important capability across the entire software development lifecycle. For example, reporting is very important in software project management both for communications and for performance management. We are addressing the topic as a common function across all lifecycle domains.

REST services defined on software development tool repositories, e.g. for Change Management, Quality Management, etc., provide a natural source of data for reports. The data may be used in the following contexts:

• operational reporting - e.g. generate tabular or graphical business reports showing the latest data, on demand
• documentation - e.g. generate complex documents showing tracibility of requirements to architectural elements and test cases
• analytics - e.g. batch load bulk data nightly to populate a data warehouse for business intelligence reporting

Further discussion of goal and scope in the kickoff meeting.

Scope

Scoping assumption:

1. The Reporting 1.0 specification must be sufficient to support the Reporting 1.0 use cases.
2. The Reporting 1.0 specification only supports domain specification 2.0, and not previous versions of domain specification.

Status

The Reporting Specification has heavy dependency on the OSLC Core Specification and thus will trail the Core Specification progress closely.

Current status: The draft specification is in convergence. Implementation validation is in progress.

Current progress can be viewed in workgroup meeting agenda and minutes.

Approach

The specifications will be developed by establishing use cases and then defining the Reportable REST Service Specifications to support them. This workgroup does not define a Reporting Specification on its own, like a domain specification. Instead, it defines a set of extra specification on top of domain specification to enable domain resources for reporting.

It is assumed that all domain resources will have REST service defined for retrieving data as part of the OSLC specifications. Currently, there are topics in OSLC on Change Management, Requirement Management, Quality Management, Software Configuration Management, Softare Estimation and Measurement, Asset Management, Architecture Management,.....etc. The REST service defined by these domain specifications are mainly focused on use cases that are transactional. Reporting use cases are typically involved retrieving large volume of data. Reporting clients are typically generic in nature and have no prior knowledge of the domain resources they are dealing with. Thus these unique reporting use cases introduce extra requirements. The objective of this Reporting specification (OSLC Reporting Specification) is to specify these extra requirements on top of the domain specificaitons. The intention is to have this as a cross domain specification. Any service provider can implement this specification to make their OSLC services consumable by reporting clients.

The OSLC Reporting Specification 1.0 should be scoped to address the mandatory features (i.e. features to make it work) first and then address those features for optimization as time allows.

Relationship with OSLC Core Specification

• The Reporting WG will input requirements based on its ReportingUseCases to the Core Specification WG.
• The Reporting WG will review Core Specification related to Reporting topics to ensure they meet Reporting requirements.
• Core Specification will be discussed and defined by the Core Specification WG. Reporting specification will make references to them as appropriate.
• The following table summarizes the Reporting topics that are driven from the ReportingUseCases and their relationship with OSLC Core Specification.

Working Documents

Note: Document becomes obsolete as the topic has moved to Core Workgroup.

Prior Work

• Insight/RPE Reportable REST Specification - current spec. defined for working with current version of Insight/RPE. This could be a good source of use cases and requirements. However, we need to be vigilant not too much influence by this spec. in choosing technologies and defining interfaces.
• OSLC-CM 1.0 Specification has many features that are somehow related to Reporting. This could be a good source to factor those out as part of the OSLC Reportable Specification and generalize for cross domain purpose.

Topics for Future Consideration

1. New use case based on RSx.
2. Sample data annotation in Resource Shape description.
3. ModelingDataUC

Milestones

Overall Milestones

Participants

TackTong (lead)
ArthurRyman
BenjaminWilliams
DragosCojocari
MikKersten
SebRose
SteveAbrams
JamesMoody
VishyRamaswamy
XiangDongHu
SteveSpeicher

ScottFairbrother

JimDaly?

StevePitschke

JoanTouzet

PaulMcMahan

PaulTasillo?

EinarKarlsen

Feedback

V1 Specification comments and issues

Mailing List

Reporting Mailing List

General Open Services