Requirements management is the process of managing your product’s needs and requirements. This is an important part of delivering a high-quality product, which is why it’s important to take time to thoroughly understand it.
Understanding Requirements Management
The IT industry places a lot of importance on software’s success and users’ satisfaction. To make sure these things are handled efficiently and accurately, companies emphasize the use of requirement management. This allows them to document, analyze, trace, agree on, monitor and prioritize these things. Additionally, requirement management is also important because it notifies your company’s stakeholders if there are any changes in a project’s requirements, as well as when it’s live so they can monitor how it functions.
Today, there are many different tools that can save you time and effort as you continuously track all the changes that occur throughout the project cycle. All of your needs are understood so they can be properly managed too. These are things that you really can’t afford to do manually any longer.
Why You Shouldn’t Use Microsoft Office for Requirement Management?
According to Software Testing Help, you shouldn’t use Microsoft Office for requirement management. Unfortunately, this is something that many businesses do even though they know they shouldn’t.
There are many reasons for this, including:
- It’s almost impossible to track changes unless you do it manually through logs or comments. However, as the project proceeds, this becomes rather tedious.
- When you have different teams working on the same project it’s possible that different versions are tracked at different places.
- Using MS office for tracking requires a lot of manual work that eats up time and resources.
The Best Tools for Requirement Management?
With requirements management tools your business will have the competitive edge. This is how important it is to automatically track changes through every step of your project’s development. Knowing these things about requirement management now, you’ll want to take a look at these tools that are available:
- Process Street is a very user-friendly tool that manages processes, team workflow, checklists and operating procedures. You can quickly and easily design your own processes, without being an expert in doing so. Additionally, it’s possible to manage recurring checklists and procedures, schedule regular workflow, monitor activity, assign tasks, and collaborate with other team members.
- Modern Requirements Tool Suite by eDev technologies is available in two different packages: SmartOffice4TFS and inteGREAT4TFS. SmartOffice4TFS is a plug-in for Microsoft Office that you can use seamlessly with Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Word.
- Abacus allows you to make or check new processes for better analysis on its implementation. It will save you a lot of time by maintaining your data’s requirements and creating reports and road maps.
- Aligned Elements helps you develop, maintain and track your files’ designs and requirements. This flexible tool can be customized to save you a lot of time. It works best for the medical industry.
- CASE Spec is very helpful when working with product specifications since it provides a unified framework for specification and traceability. This is a user-friendly program that offers graphs, trace grids, and other helpful views.
- IBM Rational DOORS is a client-server application and multi-platform tool that allows you to manage, capture, track, analyzes and link requirements and standards. This leader in the requirements management field offers a unique graphical view of your data’s hierarchy.
- Borland Caliber is a complete solution for managing your product’s life cycle – from development through testing. This speeds everything up because it makes it easy to handle changes.
- IRIS Business Architect is a very powerful tool that dynamically and continually handles any changes efficiently so you have very precise results. It’s very user-friendly, quickly correlating IT with business operations. All of your information is quite secure here.
- Accompa is the number one cloud-based requirements management tool because it’s easy to implement and use. It’s highly customized and offers high performance standards too.
- Jama is specially designed for handling projects with a waterfall life cycle. This simple, user-friendly tool works fast for repeated tasks. It provides really accurate reports based on a traceability structure. You’ll also enjoy real-time collaboration, impact analysis, a central repository, and workflow mapping.
- Case Complete helps you efficiently create and manage Use Cases. The built-in reporting system lets you publish requirements in Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and HTML formats.
- Enterprise Architect works on multiple operating systems to create a good, re-usable solution for your business. This includes creating, editing, reviewing and linking documents, properties, tests, and changed requirements.
- ComplyPro has absolutely no infrastructure. Instead, it’s a SaaS-based model solution for requirement management, meaning it’s Internet-based but not open source. However, it’s highly scalable so you can use it from anywhere and through multiple different browsers. This tool is beneficial in that it reduces risk, manages project complexities, reduces project delays, and maintains traceability.
- Innoslate is a great tool for developing, capturing and analyzing income standards’ requirements. It’s very efficient at collaborating with requirement management and model-based engineering. Many people are familiar with it because of its extensive library of diagrammatic data. This tool actually supports a lot of different types of diagrams including charts, class diagrams, LML, SysML, and timelines. You can access these things on your MAC, PC, or Android and through any browser – including Firefox, Chroma, Apple Safari, and IE 10.
- Dialpad is based solely in the cloud. This business communication platform is in tune with how your team works, regardless of where they’re working from. It lets you make and receive calls, messages, videos, and meetings from your desktop, tablet, or mobile device. In this way you can push your limitations to new levels.
There are a lot of tools available for requirements management today. Each of these tools is unique in the support it offers, as well as how strong and functional it is. Knowing how to properly use these tools for your company’s long-term success is important. It all starts with choosing the right tool and keeping it up-to-date. Hopefully now you feel better equipped to do so.
Leave a Reply