JIRA/Greenhopper, EA and Requirements Management

[AndyJ]

Hi Team,

I'm looking at using JIRA (with the Greenhopper overlay) for requirements development and management.

Has anyone tried synchronising Requirements between JIRA and EA?

Andy

[Paul Lotz]

We use JIRA and Greenhopper to schedule our tasks, some of which involve fixing bugs.

We also create requirements in EA using the SysML technology.  (We are moving to do this more--currently we import many requirements from Word documents, unfortunately.)  We then create test cases linked to the requirements and import the requirements and test cases into Enterprise Tester, where we capture the test results and show the final traceability.

I guess my note of caution is that I wouldn't equate every requirement with a Greenhopper task.  A task is generally something that takes at least half a day, in my experience, and may involve satisfying a number of requirements.  I'm not sure I would recommend tracking requirements directly in JIRA.

[AndyJ]

Yes...

What I'm considering is perhaps an abuse of JIRA, but I'm looking for a nice cheap way to do requirements management, on a project that has the potential for a LOT of requirements.

In JIRA the Tech Lead would likely be assigning tasks based on the Use Case basic and alternative flows.

I'm considering creating a new issue type "Requirement" in JIRA which lets me track the evolution of a requirement (and particularly the discussions with the SMEs) that get a requirement beyond the "proposed" stage.

Within EA I will be tracing requirements through to test cases.

It would be nice to automatically flow changes (Description and Status) from JIRA to EA... and I'm hoping that someone else has done this kind of thing.

[Paul Lotz]

"I'm looking for a nice cheap way to do requirements management, on a project that has the potential for a LOT of requirements."

My advice is to make sure you know what you need to do with your requirements and be sure you can do that, even if the upfront cost is a little more.  We've spent a lot of time dealing with tools that weren't up to the task--and we still don't have the best solution.  You want to make sure you get the value out of the requirements for the investment you make.

"It would be nice to automatically flow changes (Description and Status) from JIRA to EA... and I'm hoping that someone else has done this kind of thing."

Enterprise Tester does link JIRA issues to requirements in EA, and the two nominally synchronize to reflect comments or status changes on either side.  I don't know if anyone else has done this part or not.

"I'm considering creating a new issue type "Requirement" in JIRA which lets me track the evolution of a requirement (and particularly the discussions with the SMEs) that get a requirement beyond the "proposed" stage."

I'm actually quite curious to learn more about what you want to do.  One thing is that you can do some level of requirements change management within EA itself.  I guess I see what you want: capture the discussion in JIRA and when you approve it automatically update the requirement's status in EA.  So you'd be managing requirement change in JIRA but traceability in EA, I guess.  Hmm....  That is interesting, at least.  Sorry I don't know more to help you.