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Topic

The Topic is Clarive's central delivery lifecycle entity.

Clarive is not just about the technical components put in releases. Organizations that use Clarive manage logical "documents" called Topics that handle the different aspects of their delivery process. This may include different types of releases, sprints, etc. These documents have workflows which can represent many different logical states and changes are attached to these Topics. They also have fields, with role-based security and actions.

A Topic category is an organization-defined form instance that has an associated workflow. Think of it as a template.

A Topic is an instance of the Topic category, that has an assigned MID.

Topic Category

Every Topic category in Clarive can have any number of fields, a workflow with statuses and transition Rules or constraints, as well as Dashboards for context filtered insight and reporting.

A Topic category typically has the following properties:

  • A set of statuses.
  • A workflow.
  • A form Rule, with its defined fieldlets.
  • Field-level security
  • Transition-level security: which user/roles can transition a Topic from one status to the next.
  • A color, for visual representation of the category.
  • An acronym, to easily represent the Topic category name.
  • A discussion.

Some Topic categories may be:

  • Release
  • Changeset
  • Issue
  • Bug or Defect
  • Test Case
  • Estimation
  • Request
  • Sprint
  • User Story
  • Product Backlog

Changesets, and any other Topics, can be grouped into releases. Having Topics grouped in releases is the key to fully-fledged orchestration of the delivery lifecycle.

Why Topics?

We believe that every installation must have full control over how their process is defined. Therefore having standard, out-of-the-box entities in a delivery lifecycle tool actually interferes with the ground-up thinking that is needed to have the most adapted process.

Topics are great for both brownfield and greenfield implementations, as they can ajust and adapt to existing processes, but also help define new, unconstrained processes that can best represent the organization's needs.

Activity

Each topic has an Activity tab that displays a timeline of all changes, comments, workflow transitions, and pipeline jobs related to the topic.

When topics are added or removed from a topic grid field (such as a planning field), the activity entry displays the changes with clear detail:

  • Added topics are listed with their colored category badge and title.
  • Removed topics are listed with their colored category badge and title.

This makes it easy to see exactly which topics were linked or unlinked, rather than showing only raw topic MID numbers.

When CI (Resource) fields are modified on a topic, the activity entry displays the changes with the CI icon and name:

  • Added CIs are listed with their resource icon and name.
  • Removed CIs are listed with their resource icon and name.

This applies to both new events and legacy events stored before this feature was available.

When user fields (such as assigned users) are modified on a topic, the activity entry displays each user with their avatar and real name:

  • Added users are listed with their avatar and real name.
  • Removed users are listed with their avatar and real name.

When text fields (such as description) are modified, the activity entry includes a View changes link that opens a modal showing a unified diff of the changes, with additions highlighted in green and deletions in red.

Seen By

The Seen By feature allows users to see who has viewed a Topic. When viewing a Topic, an eye icon is displayed next to the Topic MID badge. Clicking on the eye icon opens a popover listing all users who have seen the Topic, along with the timestamp of their last visit.

This feature is controlled by the View who has seen a Topic action permission, which can be configured per category in the Roles administration panel. Only users with this permission will see the eye icon in the Topic view.