Requirements Management

[playerz]

Hi guys.
I want to know how to do requirements management with the EA.
It is easy to trace requirements with Use Case and classes, but I am struggling to make connections between requirements / Use Cases and documents.

Does anyone have some sample project where the requirements management is applied so that I can look?

Already looked at all the white papers and know that EA is not as good for this purpose, but would like to make the maximum possible with him.
thanks

[paddler]

Hey

 You may not have to go out and buy his book but try and look for something by Doug Dosenberg at iconixsw.com

 I bought his Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML book and it is based on EA. His last chapter touches on Requirements Management and it has helped me get my head around how to capture them.

 The biggest trick I have found is to build a requirements hierarchy that you can effectively report on. This is almost thinking backwards about the problem but I have found that once you determine what your Reqts doc needs to look like, you can structure the requirements appropriately ( and include Use Cases, UIs etc) and then report on them effectively

[paddler]

Hey man,

 Here is the link to the book

 http://www.iconixsw.com/Books.html

  Good luck [smiley=cheesy.gif]

[TomO]

but I am struggling to make connections between requirements / Use Cases and documents.

Hey Playerz,
If you are looking for traceability between EA (requirements use-cases etc) and the documents you have on your file system, (ones that explain or extend what those elements represent) then there are a number of ways you can include them on your model.

The first is by using the "Files" tab of the element properties. In this tab you can link your element to one or many documents, images, audio files etc that are sitting in your file system (local or network). This is advantageous if you have predefined documents you wish to remain external to the model but still need to be referenced. Its also worth noting that you can add websites in the same way. Once the file list has been created you can launch those documents/web-pages from that tab for quick reference.

The second way to reference a document would be to use a "Linked Document" These are RTF documents that are associated with any element and are stored with-in the model (No need to keep track of files on the local file-system). To access the linked document simply right click on the element and select "Create Linked Document" [Ctrl + Alt + D] EA comes with a host of default templates you can use, or you can simply copy your current document and paste it directly in. Elements that have linked documents also gain a little A symbol for easily identifying the ones with vs the ones without. The documents that are referenced in this way are also included in the HTML and RTF (template dependent) reports.

The third way to reference documents in EA is to simply drag and drop them from the file system onto an active diagram. This will give you the choice of either creating a hyperlink or an artifact. The hyperlink when clicked will open the referenced file. If you select the create artifact option it will create an element with the file referenced in the files tab automatically for you.

Hopefully this helps a bit

Best Regards

TomO

[Paolo F Cantoni]

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Elements that have linked documents also gain a little A symbol for easily identifying the ones with vs the ones without.
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TomO

Hi Tom,

Is there some semantics to the A symbol?
As in "A" for attached?

I think it would be useful to have an  E symbol for those items which reference external files.  Link to externalities are very important in modelling and it's a shame EA doesn't give an indication of them.

Paolo

[dmf]

An approach I have taken is to represent an external requirement document as an Artifact element, then the individual sections in that document as Feature (or Requirement) sub-elements - facilitates good traceability.

To assist with this, I have written a python script to automate the importing of a folder tree of requirement documents (eg. word & pdfs), into EA as artifact elements, each with a tagged value of the file url, while duplicating the structure in the EA Project Browser.  Sort of like doing a code import but with documents.

I prefer using a file url tagged value as it is more visible than adding it the the 'Files' list.

[beginner]

Basically we're importing requirements from DOORS (that sucks). We're also creating document artifacts. For these we have a profile to tag them with things like Document Number, Document Type, etc. The latter are used for req. which are not in DOORS. We simply create Req. artifacts and place them inside the document artifact.

b.