Documenting & Tracking Requirements

Question

When it comes to sizable software projects, what are the tools for managing requirements?

• Documenting
• Tracking
• Alarming
• Reporting

Q1. Which one(s) do you use and why?

Q2. Assuming you could switch to another platform, which one would it be?

Answer 1

Hi,

The King of requirements definition and management, if you have the budget, is of course, Telelogic Doors, which is now Rational Doors. This gives you an integrated view across the full requirements for the whole development team, backed by a strong document change management and tracking service that ensures that requirements stay up to date and that everybody knows what the current requirements set is. It is an enterprise solution. It enables you to tie project plans, dev and unit test specifications, scenario testing, rollout and final stage acceptance into one integrated view. Its excellent.

Sometimes, you really don't need a solution for requirements management. I once worked with a PM who used to deliver Prince 2, £20-40m fixed cost projects,on time and budget, on a regular basis, using nothing more than a RTT sheet , which is a requirements traceability table. Simplly an Excel sheet that has a single line for each requirement, a worksheet for each product, a book for each stage plan. On each line, you have the requirement, contract name, developer(s) assigned, PM, team leader, test and associated spec and their locations, dev and test end dates, stage plan associated with the specs, signoff date, and a few extra fields. Its a very effective way of doing requirements management, if you don't have the money.

Hope that helps. scope_creep

Answer 2

Many of the cheaper tools are either:

• Not very good at documenting
• Or, not very good at managing

"Not very good at documenting" includes database-oriented, form-centric tools, whose idea of 'documention' is an input edit box for the title and a text area for the description, and which don't necessarily even support the idea of subsections (they may be just a flat list of top-level items).

"Not very good at managing" includes anything that only supports text (e.g. MS Word does documention but not managing), or which isn't well integrated with whatever external tool you use for your documentation (so that different people update/maintain the documentation or the management/status information but not both, so they get out of synch).

Also there are three kinds of price:

1. Free or cheap (see above)
2. Expensive ($1000s per seat), or priceless (i.e. they don't advertise a price)
3. There are also some products whose marketing, at least, is oriented to a specific industry (especially the aerospace industry)