Polarion Pluses and Minuses
Updated May 09, 2017

Polarion Pluses and Minuses

Fred Sookiasian | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Polarion

Polarion is used across the entire line of businesses in our entire corporation. Each business is its "own" entity but has crossover products and processes from division to division. As such, many products might share common components and imbedded technologies while each SKU is its own item and has its own "life span." Each division has its own sandbox but many higher level components within each sandbox span across multiple units. The business problem that it addresses is the disparity that would happen by either design or circumstance and it ties in through "traceability" all the aspects of requirements in the lifecycle that would otherwise fall through the cracks.

Pros

  • The workflows that are customizable in Polarion are amazing. They have specified workflows for companies that deal with different product lines related to regulatory requirements like medical devices. The ability to enhance "out of the box" workflows helps with risk mitigation immensely without having to allocate so many resources to get it going from ground up.
  • Reporting - bringing together dashboards with key metrics is an absolute must and leveraging output based on needs from executive level presentations to development metrics is a winner for us. And the drill downs are immensely useful for anyone who wants to get the microscopic view of what drives our success on that nth degree.
  • Over all Risk Mitigation: Risk based ALM is very important to us. The ability to integrate our regulatory SOPs into our own client defined formats and procedures gives us the leverage to tie in all that traceability I discussed earlier into palpable digests of risk which our company leaders use to drive vision.
  • Requirements management is an absolute nightmare for most people. Polarion helps us drive requirements on different levels like regualtory, business, user interface, etc. This ties in to all the risk mitigation criteria we so much rely on to make us succeed.

Cons

  • More robust engine as far as the actual took is concerned. There are navigation components in trace to reporting which we feel can be improved especially when dealing with cross global accessing of the tool. It slows us down a bit so it's backend driven optimization as well as some front end "clunkiness" that can be improved.
  • Improve some filtering capabilities especially in creating custom reports and generally all around the ALM components of the tool.
  • As of the version we have, the ability to enhance replationship types in traceability is limited.
  • Ability to see and act upon risk components related to requirements to test tracing that would have been missed or overlooked especially during regulatory submission.
  • Always ready reporting for executive management based on trending of product releases before they hit the market.
  • One negative is the resources required to maintain the tool which for most non large organizations would be a huge overhead.
Polarion is a juggernaut of a tool when it comes to traceability and modelling. And it is far better for task management.
It is well suited in just about any large scaled environment. For the cost to benefit ratio, it works perfect for large scaled systems. With standard traceability matrix view and enhanced task management, it's a behemoth of a software and welcomed one. In the cases for smaller efforts or organizations, it may be a tall order so I would heed with caution for those people. Polarion has wonderful modelling abilities to test try any system being built. And the Risk Management components are down right amazing. Some filtering enhancements can help it rise to the top as well as performance optimizations.

Using Polarion

233 - Polarion is used from all levels of business functions from software and hardware engineering, marketing, business analyst and PMO group as well as the executive staff. Each group has their own moderator as workflows and key metrics are a result for each group.
10 - DEvOps stakeholders are the people that represent Polarion. Each one trained to use Polarion for core activities such as workflows, configuration as well as desktop support. The back end involves another 5 people but they provide a passive level of support such as hardware and the network infrastructure layer.
  • Requirements traceability for CAPA
  • Defect reporting to standard and non standard releases
  • Product workflow risk analysis
  • User story for new functionality
  • Creation of dashboard to highlight most frequent usages based on defect types
  • Requirements flagging for heavy risk areas
  • Integration into Supply Chain
  • Integration into executive business workflows
There is too much at stake to go into a new system. But with everything else being promised as far as newer more innovative products, the justification to not renew is a huge risk so that is not a concern.

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