Suggestions for requirements development tools that support CMMI objectives

Question

We are currently evolving our development processes in an effort to become CMMI compliant (we will start with level 2, and move up from there). We are trying to locate a tool that is inexpensive (or free) that will allow us to develop requirements in the spirit of CMMI. In other words, we need to be able to enter our requirements, track changes to them, provide alerts to individuals when requirements change, perform traceability, etc. Our projects are typically small (typically 3 - 7 developers and a tester or two).

We have looked at many of the commercial tools, but they cost more than we are able to afford. We looked at a few on SourceForge (OSRM and others) but could not find anything that was sufficiently mature that also had the features that we needed.

We are looking for suggestions for a tool that meets the above requirements.

Answer 1

How about starting of with a Wiki? We use TWiki but there are many others available. The wiki we uses

• sends an email when any pages change
• stores the history of changes to each page
• by using the auto-linking of wikis you can create a hierarchy of requirements

This seems to cover most of your items. Wikis like TWiki have plugins which may also help you.

If you only have 3-7 developers on a project using one of the big commercial tools may be far too complex for what you need.

Answer 2

We're heavily into CMMI at our company, but all of our tools are developed in-house.

All I can recommend is to develop your own tools. You will at least have the advantage that it will reflect your business process.

In general, for a new tool, we start off with a tool developed on a project, which is then shared with the rest of the company, if it has been successful. Don't be afraid to use Excel to trace your requirements along with a statuts, which along with a good change control system, such as subversion, gives you a lot of traceability.

Answer 3

A team in the company I used to work for was working on customizing Visual Studio Team System work item templates to handle requirements tracking. One goal, which you should consider as well, was to enable traceability from requirements through to developer work items and then defects. This enables some powerful analysis of which requirements are tied to the most defects.

Answer 4

INCOSE is an excellent resource for this sort of question. They maintain a Tools Database that indexes COTS and GOTS System Engineering tools. Some of the tools that perform requirements management also have high-level System Eng functionality (CORE, for example) whereas others are more narrowly-focused (i.e. RequistePro).

Most of these tools will cost money, but may provide some limited free functionality. Workspace.com, for example, provides some free functionality. I would recommend against rolling your own solution, or adapting a tool that is not specifically intended for requirements management, because the hidden cost of getting it going, as well as inefficiency at the intended task could become burdensome.

If you absolutely can't afford to spend any money on a requirements tool, it would be better to use the free functionality from a commercial tool. But don't do that... pony up the cash for RequisitePro and sleep better knowing that you're getting the right tool for the job.