Requirements Blog

A common question we get from our customers is 'Can you show me a sample project so I can get an idea of how to get started'? We have heard this enough to take this question serious and provide a very simple link for creating a sample project. When a user creates a new account, at the bottom of the features navigation there will be a link to "create sample project".

By looking at the sample requirements management project, rather than needing to read through the manual or even watch a training video, it becomes obvious how to manage requirements just by looking at the test data.

The sample requirements data will be available starting late October or early November.

I'll be the first to admit that trying to find a reason for implementing new technology is not as prudent as finding a business reason for the technology. That includes trying to find various usages for social-networking functionality not necessarily on social networking web sites.

Some people in the office have been kicking around the idea of integrating social-networking features within project management and/or requirements management. Many of us are on linked-in and facebook, and we like the idea of sharing with people
-- what they are doing right now??
-- sharing any new thoughts??

If you have a mini-social network within your project team, it's definitely doable to share features or ideas within the project team. If someone adds a new features and you select to share it, when people log in to the project tool you would see:
-- Fred Gates just added a new ecommerce feature
-- Sean Smith is posing the question about xyz

Yes it could work, but is it a stretch? The short answer is that we're not sure and until we start seeing a gravity towards this kind of functionality in other tools and having customers consistently request this functionality, this won't be a part of the project management platform for some time to come.

But we'll keep an eye on it.... Happy Labor Day Weekend!!

For a few years now, one of the most common items on our wishlist has been the ability for customers to "copy" objects from one project to another. (objects referring to features, requirements, and use cases). If you think about a project as a big folder with features and requirements being physical files, you should be able to copy these features from one project (folder to another).

As of now, GatherSpace has provided the ability to map features from one project to another. The problem with this ability is that it's been totally confusing for customers. We see scenarios where one customer changes it on a project and it no longer makes sense in the context of the originating project.

For this reason, we will be removing the ability to map features from one project to another and just allow customers to copy information from one project to another.

In working with the project managers and engineers of GatherSpace, we expect to roll this functionality out by late August. We always welcome ideas and comments regarding this newly anticipated functionality.

~Kyle, Senior Account Manager

As a business analyst in LA for close to ten years, I've worked both as a full-time employee and indpendent consultant working for typical LA based fortunte 500 companies including Warner Brothers, The Capital Group, Countrywide Financial and Sony. Honestly, I'm not tooting my own horn. These are very stoggy, conservative companies and the projects are typical not exciting, management is often over-weighted and slow to make any decisions. One other thing all of these firms have in common is that they want to adopt a process, usually RUP, but stumble through it and find they can't get there because of their enormous size.

I have used Requisite Pro at all of these companies, and the end result has proven unsuccessful. Now I'm not saying Requisite Pro is the cause of the failure, it's usually the fault of overall adoption. Lets face it, a tool is only as successful as the employees allow it to be. If one person has a fax machine, it's useless in the world around them. Same principal applies to software, and to requirements management tools.

Since I have seen the failure of Requisite Pro at all of these companies, I will tell you the common reasons for the failure and will get to some positive aspects about the software as well.

1) The Price Just for starters, although this isn't a reason for failure, only the deepest of pockets need to deploy a tool that goes into the 20-88,000 dollar price tag. ReqPro was built to layer into Rational Rose so they could offer requirements management.

2) Complexity of Parent-Child Relationships Requisite Pro provides vary interesting parent-child relationships in all elements of requirements -- features, software requirements, use cases, glossary terms, test cases, etc. The problem is that this complexity strangles any business analyst who wants to keep their project simple. Features are typically not parent-child based, software requirements are. There is no way to keep the project simple, unless you read documentation for simplification.

3) Microsoft Word into Req Pro, but not vice versa? Requisite Pro provides a pretty slick way of providing the ability to document everything from Microsoft Word and then migrate the document into your Requisite Pro hierarchy. After several hours on hold with IBM and speaking with several Rational consultants, there is NO way to reverse engineer requirements from Requisite Pro back into a Word document. This seems like such an obvious request, yet if you want to keep your document updated, you have to do it manually. Doh!

4) Use Cases with no Diagrams I love use cases, especially the visual context of use cases, although another Requisite Pro abortion is the lack of diagramming tools from within Requisite Pro. Any IBM expert will tell you that's what Rational Rose is for, but what about the 9 out of 10 business analysts who don't have access to Rose or don't care to have to juggle multiple layers of overloaded tools

5) Reports are plain ASCII If you like to build requirements documents in plain text, maybe this tool is for you, but for the 99% of the executives who like to bold, italicize, add images, layer in color, your out of luck with any recent version of Requisite Pro.
Requisite Pro has some pretty nifty features, my favorite being able to provide traceability at all requirement levels and being able to segregate and workflow all requirement elements -- but not for the $6,000 a seat price tag.

Your fed up with managing your requirements and use cases using spreadsheets or napkins and realize the value in automating your requirements management process. After some basic exploration on google, you have found there are dozens of tools on the market and may be wondering which tools deliver the best bang for your buck.

I have been a software developer, a business analyst and a project manager in some capacity for over ten years and have been exposed to quite a few tools and want as many people to gain from my experience and guide you through this daunting maze.

There are several criteria for choosing the appropriate tool. While I won't go through each criteria, I will go through the most critical and we will show you which tools stand up as the best in their class.
1) Price
2) Useability
3) Functionality
4) Diagram Development
5) Team Sharing
6) Support and Documentation
7) Dazzling Reports
8) Integration
9) Performance
10) Installation