Requirements management
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We like using Enterprise Architect for this. What we tend to do is define a single solution which we use to track the requirements, so that we can ensure traceability by using the same model to hold the use cases. It's a lot more robust than trying to manage via Excel/Word.
"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith
As Braveheart once said, "You can take our freedom but you'll never take our Hobnobs!" - Martin Hughes.
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Stuart Dootson wrote:
DOORS
Shudder - one of our clients uses that and it's a complete PITA trying to get anything out of them. It does have one thing going for it, it's DOORS for Windows.
"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith
As Braveheart once said, "You can take our freedom but you'll never take our Hobnobs!" - Martin Hughes.
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Stuart pointed me to the one you mean, I'll have a look at it shortly. Thanks. Elaine :rose:
Join the cool kids - Come fold with us[^]
Ping me offline if you want more details on how we use it. (It was fun saying that).
"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith
As Braveheart once said, "You can take our freedom but you'll never take our Hobnobs!" - Martin Hughes.
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Marc Clifton wrote:
So I'm assuming you're talking about functional requirements rather than design / implementation requirements?
Yes, this is feeding the requirements into the software teams and I am responsible for the test development. There will be unit testing but that is a separate task and is design related. Naturally there will be a waterfall method with iterations, I'm not treating it as a black box. In digital broadcasting there are messages containing various tables which contain various descriptors. Some standards relate to system functionality, some how tables and descriptors operate to provide functionality. At the moment it looks like I will have to provide use cases and their relation to various standards and tables/descriptors. This is what drives the software development to cover functionality and compliance. The two are not the same by the way since broadcasters sometimes ignore their own standards. Budget, development time etc. are the responsiblity of the software development teams. For a few countries/operators such as the UK there are ATPs in the form of test suites with content and procedures which are a great help but have holes (of course), you are right about ATPs. Initially I need to determine use and test cases, standards coverage and table/descriptor use. A custom application would be nice. RAC anyone? *ducks* I thought about Word, Excel etc. but tracking the relationships between standards/customer requirements, tables/descriptors, use cases (which aren't always in standards) and test cases is too complex. A database could store the information and relationships but interfacing efficiently would need a lot of work. It will probably take one to two years to get everything rolling nicely, at first any reduction in chaos will be an improvement. :-D Thanks for the help Marc. Elaine :rose:
Join the cool kids - Come fold with us[^]
Trollslayer wrote:
A database could store the information and relationships but interfacing efficiently would need a lot of work.
Well, if you're ever interested in a custom solution.... :)
Trollslayer wrote:
Thanks for the help Marc.
You're welcome! Marc
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Marc Clifton wrote:
So I'm assuming you're talking about functional requirements rather than design / implementation requirements?
Yes, this is feeding the requirements into the software teams and I am responsible for the test development. There will be unit testing but that is a separate task and is design related. Naturally there will be a waterfall method with iterations, I'm not treating it as a black box. In digital broadcasting there are messages containing various tables which contain various descriptors. Some standards relate to system functionality, some how tables and descriptors operate to provide functionality. At the moment it looks like I will have to provide use cases and their relation to various standards and tables/descriptors. This is what drives the software development to cover functionality and compliance. The two are not the same by the way since broadcasters sometimes ignore their own standards. Budget, development time etc. are the responsiblity of the software development teams. For a few countries/operators such as the UK there are ATPs in the form of test suites with content and procedures which are a great help but have holes (of course), you are right about ATPs. Initially I need to determine use and test cases, standards coverage and table/descriptor use. A custom application would be nice. RAC anyone? *ducks* I thought about Word, Excel etc. but tracking the relationships between standards/customer requirements, tables/descriptors, use cases (which aren't always in standards) and test cases is too complex. A database could store the information and relationships but interfacing efficiently would need a lot of work. It will probably take one to two years to get everything rolling nicely, at first any reduction in chaos will be an improvement. :-D Thanks for the help Marc. Elaine :rose:
Join the cool kids - Come fold with us[^]
Trollslayer wrote:
A custom application would be nice.
Come up with your requirements and let's talk.
"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith
As Braveheart once said, "You can take our freedom but you'll never take our Hobnobs!" - Martin Hughes.
-
Ping me offline if you want more details on how we use it. (It was fun saying that).
"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith
As Braveheart once said, "You can take our freedom but you'll never take our Hobnobs!" - Martin Hughes.
-
Trollslayer wrote:
A custom application would be nice.
Come up with your requirements and let's talk.
"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith
As Braveheart once said, "You can take our freedom but you'll never take our Hobnobs!" - Martin Hughes.
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My role at work is changing, I'm taking on requirements management and test development which is the slot I've been working towards for a couple of years now. My question is are there any requirements maangment packages that people would recommend? This will be working with defined standards, what is broadcast in practice etc. This will be one user initially but possibly multple users in the future and I will be publishing requirements to software engineers. Thanks. Elaine :rose:
Join the cool kids - Come fold with us[^]
QPack by Orcanos www.orcanos.com
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My role at work is changing, I'm taking on requirements management and test development which is the slot I've been working towards for a couple of years now. My question is are there any requirements maangment packages that people would recommend? This will be working with defined standards, what is broadcast in practice etc. This will be one user initially but possibly multple users in the future and I will be publishing requirements to software engineers. Thanks. Elaine :rose:
Join the cool kids - Come fold with us[^]
Welcome to my world. (I am a process developer). You may want to have a look at Polarion[^]. They have a solution based on Office tools which are being put under revision control, with added traceability. Very clever. DOORS is a blockbuster, but it requires a good knowledge of requirement theory to be used intelligently. Otherwise, it has no added value compared to Excel and a bunch of macros. I once saw a demo of the MKS suite, which was not bad, but I was disappointed by the requirement part. It was a few years ago and was a quite young product (as opposed to source and integrity), so it may be worth having a look at it. My advice would be to have a solid idea of how you want to handle your requirements, even maybe starting with Word+Excel. Then you could easily identify features that would bring you a real time saving. So, theory first -
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Requirements management….I've used DOORS (now sold by IBM) - that's not a product I like…then there's Reqtify, which is a tool for managing traceability from different sources…then there's a product from MKS which seems to be well regarded. These are all quite expensive products, however...
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p CodeProject MVP for 2010 - who'd'a thunk it!
Oh my, one more manager in the world is born... I've used fogbugz before. They have some nice features, and are much more pleasant to use for programmers than any other issue trackers out there: http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/[^] I am sure you could wrangle in some requirements in there.
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Marc Clifton wrote:
So I'm assuming you're talking about functional requirements rather than design / implementation requirements?
Yes, this is feeding the requirements into the software teams and I am responsible for the test development. There will be unit testing but that is a separate task and is design related. Naturally there will be a waterfall method with iterations, I'm not treating it as a black box. In digital broadcasting there are messages containing various tables which contain various descriptors. Some standards relate to system functionality, some how tables and descriptors operate to provide functionality. At the moment it looks like I will have to provide use cases and their relation to various standards and tables/descriptors. This is what drives the software development to cover functionality and compliance. The two are not the same by the way since broadcasters sometimes ignore their own standards. Budget, development time etc. are the responsiblity of the software development teams. For a few countries/operators such as the UK there are ATPs in the form of test suites with content and procedures which are a great help but have holes (of course), you are right about ATPs. Initially I need to determine use and test cases, standards coverage and table/descriptor use. A custom application would be nice. RAC anyone? *ducks* I thought about Word, Excel etc. but tracking the relationships between standards/customer requirements, tables/descriptors, use cases (which aren't always in standards) and test cases is too complex. A database could store the information and relationships but interfacing efficiently would need a lot of work. It will probably take one to two years to get everything rolling nicely, at first any reduction in chaos will be an improvement. :-D Thanks for the help Marc. Elaine :rose:
Join the cool kids - Come fold with us[^]
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Welcome to my world. (I am a process developer). You may want to have a look at Polarion[^]. They have a solution based on Office tools which are being put under revision control, with added traceability. Very clever. DOORS is a blockbuster, but it requires a good knowledge of requirement theory to be used intelligently. Otherwise, it has no added value compared to Excel and a bunch of macros. I once saw a demo of the MKS suite, which was not bad, but I was disappointed by the requirement part. It was a few years ago and was a quite young product (as opposed to source and integrity), so it may be worth having a look at it. My advice would be to have a solid idea of how you want to handle your requirements, even maybe starting with Word+Excel. Then you could easily identify features that would bring you a real time saving. So, theory first -
I agree, you need to determine your own requirements for this software first. Since I don't habe any large scale experience with requirements gathering, I'd start working on it with basic tools to (beginning: ) adjust the requirements for this software, then jump to a better tool (goto beginning; :-D ). I guess the most difficult part in this is to transfer from one application to the next. Anyway, let us know, I'm very interested in what you find, and more importantly, the decisions you make to get there. Good luck!
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My role at work is changing, I'm taking on requirements management and test development which is the slot I've been working towards for a couple of years now. My question is are there any requirements maangment packages that people would recommend? This will be working with defined standards, what is broadcast in practice etc. This will be one user initially but possibly multple users in the future and I will be publishing requirements to software engineers. Thanks. Elaine :rose:
Join the cool kids - Come fold with us[^]
The Aonix UML tool was great at tracking requirements through all modeling phases circa 2001. There is an open source version now, but I am not sure if it kept all of the same features. DB tables could be modeled as UML classes. http://www.openameos.org/[^]