How to automatically indicate affected requirement

[Moschops]

We have been using EA for some time to knock together sequence diagrams and basic class definitions, and we're looking at bridging a gap in our requirements traceability with it.

I've read the Sparx paper "Requirements Management with EA" and not found what I hope to find; a mechanism by which, once a requirement is linked to a specific object (such as a sequence diagram of a class or indeed anything else) a change in that object will cause the requirement to be affected in some way, so that the designer can then easily identify which requirements need to be checked (for example, taking a class that meets a requirement to add two numbers together, altering that class may mean the requirement is no longer met and will have to be checked).

The designer could manually trace back each requirement to identify which requirements need checking, but I'd like them to be self-identifying in some way. Hopefully EA provides such a mechanism and someone here can help me.

[Geert Bellekens]

Hmm, I don't think EA provides something like that out of the box, but I'm certain you can somehow get what you want using a the API a bit.

I do have some questions on how you see this happen?
How do you know for which items the linked requirements should be listed? Do you have a list of changed items, do you use the version attribute, via auditing?
Once you have this list of items who have changed it should be fairly easy to get a list of the requirements linked to those.
The easyist is probably to write an SQL search that searches the requirements linked to the changed items.

Geert

[Moschops]

I'm really basing this on my experience with another tool, ReqPro (IBM's Requisite Pro).

Ideally, upon changing an object in any way, all requirements linked to that object (i.e. each requirement which relies on that object) would be changed in a very obvious way - colour change to bright red, or their status changed to NEEDS TO BE CHECKED AGAINST OBJECTS or some such.

We know which requirements should be listed because they're the requirements realised by the changed object.

[Geert Bellekens]

So you would like some mechanism that automatically sets your requirements to "dirty" once a linked item is changed.
Then of course you want to be able to get a list of those "dirty" requirements (and probably some mechanism to remove the dirty flag).

If this is the case you will probably need to write an addin that makes the requirements dirty for you.

I guess you could use the status to indicate whether the requirement needs to be checked or not. The good thing about this is that you can assign a color to each status, giving you the visual clue you wanted.

There are some event hooks that you could use to execute the code to make the requirements dirty.

Getting a list of dirty requirements should be straight forward using an SQL search.

Geert

[Moschops]

For the moment, I'd be happy to gather the affected requirements by inspection (i.e. just looking at the diagram) if they were highlighted in some way.

Sounds like I'd have to get into adding my own functionality to EA, which I'd rather not do if I can avoid it. I'll keep looking for a while for a simple method.

Addendum: Looking through the help files, I find this:

"Create Add-Ins
        
Before you start you must have an application development tool that is capable of creating ActiveX COM objects supporting the IDispatch interface, such as:

Borland Delphi
Microsoft Visual Basic
Microsoft Visual Studio .Net. "

Presumably these Add-Ins are what I'd need to write in order to meet my needs as described above? We don't use any of these tools (we're a gcc n' EMACS kind of place), so would it really be a case of having to get one of these before we could even start customising EA? I don't know anything about ActiveX, so forgive me if these questions are a little basic.

[Paul Lotz]

I think that impact analysis (which is what you are describing) is an essential feature of requirements management and therefore supporting this in EA will be necessary to make requirements management in EA practical.

[Moschops]

I'm very new to Ent. Arch. so don't know how mature requirements management is within the software - is requirements management a relatively new thing in Ent Arch?

[Geert Bellekens]

I don't think requirements management is that new in EA, but I believe it is not considered a primary feature.
EA is before everything a (UML) Modelling tool. That is and should be the primary target. Other features such as requirements and test management are only there in a very basic form.
If need a fully developped requirements management, then you better look for a specialised software package. I think RAQuest could provide that for you, but I haven't used it.

Geert

[Moschops]

Well that seems fair enough; it would be nice to have one tool for everything, but obviously there are trade-offs to be made. I'll look into this RAQuest of which you speak; if I can't find something that will indicate requirements needing to be rechecked when the design changes, we may as well stick with our current system (which essentially involves a big table).

[Paul Lotz]

I don't think requirements management is that new in EA, but I believe it is not considered a primary feature.
EA is before everything a (UML) Modelling tool. That is and should be the primary target. Other features such as requirements and test management are only there in a very basic form....
Geert

On the other hand, requirements are an essential feature of SysML, which is an extension of UML and for which Sparx Systems sells a product; also, EA supports integration with DOORS (which works rather well).  Moreover, I think that SysML potentially is more powerful when it comes to managing requirements (primarily because all the requirements can reside in a single model) than is the requirements database text-document-centric approach, so I would very much like to see EA improve its features here.  I would much prefer to manage requirements in a SysML model than in a requirements database if the tool had the features I needed.  Unfortunately, my assessment is that basic tasks like impact analyses are quite impractical to do in EA at the present time.  This is my number one feature I would like to see improve!

[David OD]

The RaQuest product definitely has a feature designed to support impact analysis.  From my experience it is more of a process of doing the impact assessment before updating the requirement, rather than identifying changes downstream after altering the requirements.

See the topic "Tracking Requirements" on the page http://www.raquest.com/products/index.htm.

Regards
David