This article gives an overview of benefits from a requirements management tool, and features to consider when evaluating requirements management tools.
Reasons to Use Requirements Management Tools over traditional Word, Spreadsheets and Wikis
Some of the benefits of using requirements management tools are:
- Complete linking and traceability across artifacts. A good requirements tool provides ability to analyze impact of a change to all the associated artifacts
- Clickable and Interactive User Interface prototyping. While you can create static wireframes with traditional diagramming tool, a requirements management tool with prototyping and simulation feature can help you capture and communicate requirements effectively.
- Baseline/freeze requirements anytime and compare versions side by side.
- Robust reporting features can help track current project/release/iteration status, plus reporting feature can help users quickly customize the key metrics they want to track to maintain a continuous up-to-date view
- Manage change or new feature requests and keep audit track of changes to the requirements artifacts
Features to consider while evaluating Requirements Management Software
- Adaptability & Customizable: tool should be adaptable to fit your processes such as iterative, waterfall or hybrid. If your organization like most of the organizations follows multiple methodologies depending on the type project, look for a tool that supports waterfall as well as agile methodologies.
- End-to-end requirements traceability: requirements tools should let you link software requirements to all the artifacts. Look for tools that provide bi-directional and one-to-many linking.
- End-to-end impact analysis: a good requirements management should quickly help users to understand impact of a specific change on other requirements and other artifacts.
- Ease of Use: the tool should be easy to use and intuitive. Traditionally users have been using word processors and spreadsheets to manage requirements, if the requirements management tools are complex and need lot of training, users are likely to avoid them
- Requirements Visualization: helps facilitate better communications and understanding of the requirements. Prototyping and Visualization features can help you communicate thousand words in a single picture
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