Requirments Management Tool

[carlhusa]

I'd like to integrate EA 4.0 with a requirements management tool.  So, guess I have two questions:

Anybody know of a good, inexpensive (consistent with the EA price/power mix) requirements management tool?

Anybody familiar with integrating EA 4.0 with such a requirements management tool?

Thanks, in advance.

Carl

[CJ]

G'day Carl,

Haven't tried it, but take a look at:

http://www.enterpriseprocessgroup.com/brochures/EPG-RequirementControlBrochure.pdf

[thomaskilian]

I use EA itself as requirements management tool and I'm quite happy with that. I capture requirements structured as needed and keep track of project issues that arise from change requests via the system window..

[Eduardo]

I agree that EA itself is a good requirements tool.  Recently, for a bid on a larger project, we won a contest to prepare a Requirements Document using EA.

Search for earlier threads on requirements management and use cases in these groups and you'll find all the creative ways and processes for doing requirements gathering.

In short, EA can handle it.

[CJ]

Yeah, we use EA as well.  Traceability and Relationship Matrix features are excellent.

EPG-RequirementControl is a little bit of overkill for our project.

[Gobo]

Hi,
I agree with general opinion in this thread.
I used Rational Requisite Pro - great tool but too expensive. EA has ALL advantages of ReqPro and much more so EA rulez!

Gobo

PS: There are no problem with conversion of current projects from ReqPro - I made apropriate program based on automation interface.

[carlhusa]

Thanks for all your helpful words - I agree that the matirx and traceabilty work very well. I'm wondering, though, too, about change and version control.

I've inherited projects where there are abysmal requirements - vague, poorly referenced, non-standard language - and the owners are unwilling to start over from scratch.  So, we take the requiremnts, baseline them in some tool, and then manage and track changes to the requirements.  

Changes over time, snapshots in time,  for multiple attributes including priorities, owners, phases-  all the standard requirements management stuff- become very important to demonstrate progress.

Any ideas?

I may be an EAnewbie, but I've been around this for a wheel - lots of grayness here - and you guys are just terrific.  Thanks.

[Bhupinder]

Although I agree that EA can handle the requirements, you may wish to look at CaliberRM from Borland.

I am not sure of its costs.  But it certainly covers what you are asking for.

Bas

[Bruno.Cossi]

You certainly can connect any standard Version Control tool to EA. The connection is not the most elegant, but it does the job!

Bruno

Thanks for all your helpful words - I agree that the matirx and traceabilty work very well. I'm wondering, though, too, about change and version control.

I've inherited projects where there are abysmal requirements - vague, poorly referenced, non-standard language - and the owners are unwilling to start over from scratch.  So, we take the requiremnts, baseline them in some tool, and then manage and track changes to the requirements.  

Changes over time, snapshots in time,  for multiple attributes including priorities, owners, phases-  all the standard requirements management stuff- become very important to demonstrate progress.

Any ideas?

I may be an EAnewbie, but I've been around this for a wheel - lots of grayness here - and you guys are just terrific.  Thanks.

[Rob_M]

Hi Carl,

I've done quite a bit of exploration of requirements management with EA and, unfortunately, it falls a bit short. It's still a great tool for the price, but certain requirement management aspects are not handled very weill.

Consider version control. The only thing you can do with EA is version control a package. All that gives you is the ability to check in a whole package, and check out a whole package. You don't have fine grain control to the element (i.e. requirement) level. Often when requirements development/management you would like to have each requirement version controlled. Moreover, you would like to be able to compare two versions of the same requirement side by side (say version 1.1 and 1.4) to see how it has changed. Or you may want to do a large diff between two baselines of requirements to see what has changes from one baseline to another.

The version control in EA simply uses a version control system like CVS to store files that contain XMI files. You could do a cvsdiff (or diff in your own CM tool) but you are essentially doing an ASCII diff between two XMI files - not exactly the best form to compare two baselines.

I suggested one approach to version individual elements here:

http://www.sparxsystems.com.au/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=UMLPRO;action=display;num=1078329780;start=4#4

but its quite manual and leaves quite a bit to be desired.

The other problem with EA for requirements management is there is no easy way to see the impact a requirement change has on other linked components. Sure we can put up a matrix and see which elements are directly linked but it is difficult to find out which elements link to the linked elements.

You can also put up the hierarchy view (Ctrl-Shift-4) but it doesn't show all types of links (like trace).

I believe Calibre RM is something like $3000 per seat so I hope you have bags of money if this is the approach you would like to go. Of course Calibre RM can interface to Test Director, and Borlands modelling tool, Together - more bags of money. We looked at this but to buy Calibre for 10 people costed way too much dough. (We aren't that big of a company). Calibre RM also didn't have a way to embed diagrams into the requirements document (at least when we looked 4 months ago) so we thought that was a serious shortcoming.

In the end, I think the best solution is to develop a plug in for EA that addresses its shortcomings for requirements. Alas I haven't had the time or resources to spend doing these sorts of neat (non-revenue generating) things.

Good Luck

Rob M

[armelle]

Hi,

This "import tool' seems quite interesting.
Do you think you could you share the source code?

Let me know,
Regards,
Armelle

[barny451]

IMO EA is cheap and effective as a requirements modelling tool, i.e.  it does a good job of modelling individual requirements and their relationships to each other and to other parts of the model, but it falls far short as a requirements management tool.

Requirements management is about managing and controlling a body of requirements.  RM tools such as Telelogic DOORS (which is the global market leader) and DOORS/Analyst (which allows embedding UML 2.0 models with the requirements) automate all those manual, error-prone and tedious management activities such as:
* What is affected by requirement/s change?
* What higher-level requirements(s) is this requirement trying to satisfy?
* What is the change history of this/these requirement/s?
* Automatic generation of traceability matrices
etc.
* Detaching part of the requirements structure for remote updating
* What part of the documentation structure/requirements hierarchy has not yet been updated following a requirements change?
* How many requirements contain the word 'shall', how many 'should', how many 'may'?
* How many of my requirements have been complied with?

And of course many aspects of requirements simply cannot be captured using UML, particularly non-functional, performance, regulatory, contractual, etc. requirements.  Textual requirements, diagrams, tables, are all essential in any non-trivial project.

Smaller projects can get away with a lot (by using people instead of automation tools), but the larger the project the more important it becomes (because mistakes or omissions become more expensive) to use the right tool for the job; if you use a hammer (i.e. EA) when you need a screwdriver (i.e. a proper Requirements Management tool), the screw may well be driven home, but you are unlikely to be ever able to remove it for maintenance or to change the fixing.  To take the analogy to an extreme, if you have hammered a screw in, you may well have to go out and buy an electric drill to drill out the original screw to change it when time comes for maintenance.  This might not matter if it is only one screw, but if there are a hundred, or a thousand...

So, use EA for what it is good at (UML modelling, requirements modelling), but be aware that it is not designed for versioning of individual requirements and their relationships, for requirements management, for traceability and impact analysis,...

[Takeshi K]

Hello all,

As I wrote to 'General Board', we released Requirement management tool for EA, 'RaQuest'.

I also think EA can handle and manage requirements.
One of the proof is that 'RaQuest' is made by EA Automation Interface.

But I think it's better if there is any tool to manage them effectively and track changes.
Our 'RaQuest' provides more 'Views' to manage them and means to track each requirement.

Please check and try from:
http://www.sparxsystems.jp/RaQuest/

I think many of barny451's requests are resolved with RaQuest. RaQuest is 'baby' software,
so please tell me your impression to be good software.

--
t-kouno