Tracing Requirements to Problem Statements

[CJ]

G'day folks,

Is anyone using EA to trace requirements back to original user needs and problem statements?

If so, how?

My initial thoughts were to put problem statements in requirements elements and to keep those elements in a "Problem Statements" package (it would be nice if there were such a thing as a "Problem Statement" element).

Thanks in advance and best regards.

[jaimeglz]

Hi Jason,

Just to let you know I am very interested in the issue you have raised here. I will be doing a little research on how requirements are being modeled in diagrams, specially since EA currently is using a non-UML artifact for them. (Not that I am rasing a complaint on this, because requirements are handled by EA; but, being an intensive user of EA, I want to seize this opportunity to address the non-UML symbol, as well as the more general issue you are raising.)

I'll keep you posted here on whatever progress I make, and I hope other EA users contribute to the subject.

Also, I would like to know if Sparx personnel have had any thoughts on this.

Jaime Gonzalez

[PhilR]

We are sort of doing this except that we started to use EA after our requirements had been defined (in Word).

I am guessing that the EA 'Requirement' element is a stereotype class (Sparx comment?).  In which case you can relate requirements to other model elements using an 'Implements (Relisation)' relationship. I have tried this and it seems to work OK.

You could then use the 'relationship Matrix' to check on reqirements tracability.  If say, you had requirements as row headings and all other elements as column headings, a blank row would be an unfulfilled requirement and a blank column would be an element that could not be traced to a requirement.

The only problem I can see is that requirements definition is primarily a text based exercise and entering and editing large volumes of text in EA could become tedious.

There is a product that would make a good complement to EA in this area as a text management tool.  It exports XML so it should be possible to transform its output into XMI.  See
http://www.mdesoft.com/english.htm

Don't be put off by the description of the product as a PIM it is a good general purpose text database.

Hope this helps,
Phil

[Darren Lock]

I have been using the EA External Requirement type for some time to model our requirements. I agree the process can be a bit tedious.

However, now the automation interface supports update as well as read I will be creating add-in code for MS-Word that will create an EA requirement from a selected block of text, bookmark the text with the EA Requirement ID and add a file url to the EA Requirement that points back to the bookmark in the Word document.

I had previously tested this but the creation of the EA Requirement & File link was a manual process so its now just a question of stiching the two together. BTW if you export the EA Model as HTML the file links (url to bookmark) will hyperlink back to the orginal requirements document.

I will post the code as soon as I have reasonably tested it. Watch this space (baby due in next 2 weeks so bear with me - no pun intended!)

Rgds, Darren.