Tracing to External Requirements Specifications

[Matt Thomas]

This query concerns the case when a requirement specification arrives with a development team e.g. as a Word document.

The development team want to work in EA and have full traceability to the provided specification. The team could read the document and create requirements by-hand in the model. The first problem: error-prone manual effort and delay.

The requirements will inevitably change in different releases of the specification, and the team want to flow through these changes. The team could use a document compare and do a by-hand change to the requirements. The second problem: a repeat of the error-prone manual effort and delay.

Can anyone propose another approach that EA currently supports, where the customer provides their requirements externally to the model?

Or are there are middleware solutions?

[qwerty]

Many people think that requirements can be managed automatically. That is completely wrong. Requirements are the very basic of each project and failure of delivery is caused by not having handled requirements in the correct way. So: go the "error prone" way and look at each requirement. Try to understand it (which needs not only technicians but also linguists that detect "underlying" meanings of sentences). Once you got your requirements in a formalised format you can go on with synthesising use cases.

N.B. I have seen failing this automation way when using DOORS. Here the Word docs are "automagically" split into requirements. But if you don't check each of those requirements manually you only get scarp and your project will run into trouble - unfortunately too late so the repair cost is even higher.

q.

[Steven]

Just a tool is not the answer. Some requirement management where there is someone or a group guarding the requirements. Sounds to me you got a lot of people allowed to tinker with the requirements and that alone is reason enough to be worried if you will ever reach the end of a product release.

Freeze requirements for a release and any new requirement or change for a requirement start a discussion whether that new requirement fits in the current release or will be done in the next release.

[Sunshine]

If a customer doesn't have a tool then get them to put the requirements in a spreadsheet and CVS import into EA in the first place but export CSV with the GUIDs to the customer to change if they need to so a re-import can sync using GUIDs. User version control or baselining to capture snapshots so you can compare changes.

However I'd suggest forgeting about using the requirements specification as the master source. Change it around so the requirements are put into EA and documents generated from it. Its much more efficient that way.
 
I've seen a lot of projects get into trouble by allowing requirements to be sourced in MSWord and then try to retro-fit into a more structured tool such as Sparx EA.  Begin with the end in mind. If you want traceability use a tool rather than some word processor.

 
Professor Sunshine
Bsc(Hons), PhD, MIEE, MIEEE etc

Never under estimate large numbers of stupid people.

[qwerty]

Never under estimate large numbers of stupid people.

The so called wisdom of crowds. Or in other words: Myriads of flies can't be wrong. Eat feces¹.

q.

¹vulg. S-H-I-T (this stupid boards forces me to put an emphasis on this word as when writing S-H-I-T without dashes it will replace it by the word nuts which is definitely not S-H-I-T).