Good requirements
for good solutions with objectiF RPM
Requirements engineering is a challenge. To create solutions that meet expectations, you need to know the goals and requirements of all stakeholders. To meet quality standards, you need seamless methods for requirements analysis, documentation and reviewing. And to ensure the traceability of development, you need version-controlled requirements management.
objectiF RPM has it covered.
Stakeholder Analysis
First and foremost, a newly developed solution should succeed in creating its intended business value. Accomplishing this requires getting to know each and every stakeholder and their goals. It’s also necessary to define the scope of the solution so that costs and deadlines don’t get out of hand as the project progresses. That all implies intensive communication. Here visual means are best.
In objectiF RPM, you’ll find goal diagrams for visualizing relationships between stakeholders, their goals and the requirements derived from them. You’ll also find context diagrams for delimiting the solution. Stakeholder information, goals and diagrams are subject to version control, so you can track changes at any time.
More useful features for stakeholder analysis:
- Customizable forms for describing all results and artifacts – for uniform documentation
- Real-time analyses of results – for efficient teamwork while reviewing and weighting stakeholder goals
- Sharing results through e-mail – for easy coordination with everyone involved
- Workflows for stakeholder reviews – for ensuring high quality results and artifacts
A goal diagram is a visual method for analyzing stakeholders, including their goals and relationships
Requirements Analysis & Requirements Review
Understanding, defining and refining requirements – these are the central tasks of requirements analysis. Here it’s often useful to change perspectives with use cases, personas, business processes and business entities. In objectiF RPM you can choose between established and reliable means of visual communication, such as use case diagrams, swimlane, package diagrams, and UML/SysML block and class diagrams. Requirements diagrams are particularly helpful. They can be used to model the relationships of requirements to stakeholders, personas, use cases, test cases and architecture components.
Modelling is just one of several options for creating requirements.
Have requirements been accurately and completely defined? Have the stakeholders been understood properly? objectiF RPM helps you answer these questions with asynchronous reviews across distributed remote review teams. You don’t have to leave the quality of requirements to chance.
An example of a requirement diagram and its elements
Easily add, edit, refine, prioritize, evaluate, and version requirements – directly in the product backlog
You can use forms to create and edit requirements.
You can record, edit, evaluate and prioritize requirements directly in the Product Backlog.
You can import and export requirements from and to various file formats, such as MS Excel, MS Word and the Requirements Interchange Format ReqIF.
You can exchange requirements directly with other systems – for example, with Jira.
You can derive requirements from stakeholder e-mails.
Requirements Documentation
Up-to-date requirements documents whenever you need them – is that even possible without an unreasonable amount of effort? Yes! In objectiF RPM you can create requirements specifications and other requirements documentation in a fraction of the usual time. Use document templates to generate MS Word and PDF files for you work results. When requirements, diagrams, analyses or other artifacts change, you can easily generate a fresh document with just a few clicks.
Three more time-saving tips for requirements documentation with objectiF RPM:
- No time to fine-tune a document template for your requirements specifications? objectiF RPM provides a Word template for ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148:2011 specification sheets.
- Special formatting for corporate design? All templates can be individually customized.
- Same text in multiple documents? Create your own reusable templates.
Documentation, such as requirements specifications, can be generated with the click of a button using the templates provided by objectiF RPM
Requirements Management
There are three questions to answer before beginning with requirements engineering: How will the results and artifacts be managed and organized? What’s the best way to keep an overview of large quantities of requirements? How will work progress be measured? objectiF RPM has the answers.
To manage your results and artifacts, you can use objectiF RPM’s preconfigured structures. Version control, version comparison and the ability to revert to older states are built in. A result or artifact is versioned automatically when it changes into a state that you define. You can draw baselines to record the general state of development of various results.
Real-time hierarchical analyses and requirements lists allow you to keep an overview of large quantities of requirements. You can configure lists and analyses to suit your needs and use filters to select specific information.
How is work on requirements progressing? A glance at objectiF RPM’s dashboards will show you. At any moment, you can check how many requirements are defined, in realization or completed.
3 questions, 3 answers and 1 takeaway: objectiF RPM makes requirements engineering quick and easy.
Dashboards inform you about the overall state of your requirements at any time
Requirements Changes & Traceability
Requirements have many sources and relationships as well as references to other results and elements. What happens when a stakeholder revises their goals? How will you locate the affected requirements and related elements – down to the level of code? And if certain relationships between requirements and test cases cease to exist or new ones are created, how can you trace these changes over a longer period of time? objectiF RPM provides you with several instruments for recognizing the effects of changes in the past and present.
Among other features, you can:
- Get an overview of the current relationships between results by using individually configurable real-time queries
- Navigate from within diagrams, backlogs, analyses and forms directly to dependent elements
- Trace the history of requirements including their relationships
End-to-end traceability is ensured. objectiF RPM helps you find out why a feature was developed the way it is, and what was changed in the code due to which requirements, by whom and when. Managing code in objectiF RPM means you can navigate from any version of a code file directly to the state of the requirement for which the version was created. Even if the requirement has been changed in the meantime, you can still trace how it and the associated code looked at an earlier point in time.
Open up the history of a specific requirement to take a look at earlier versions in detail…
… and find the corresponding code files and their different versions
That’s how to create complete traceability from requirements to code
For your unique needs and situation
Requirements often look different in different technical domains. If your requirements have specific attributes that aren’t relevant to other industries or organizations, you can simply add these attributes objectiF RPM to the requirements and their input forms.
Stakeholders, project managers, testers and developers all need different information about requirements. With the integrated form designer in objectiF RPM you can create requirements forms customized for different target groups – simply by clicking.
objectiF RPM can also be customized in the following ways:
- Create your own templates for document generation
- Set up dashboards, backlogs, views and backlogs according to need
- Modify suggested workflows – for rquirements reviews, for example – to fit your organizational processes
Ensure acceptance of your procedures among all parties.
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The toolbox offers various control elements, like text fields, tabs, buttons, check boxes and dropdown menus, that can be simply dragged into the form.
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Die Vorschau des Formulars. Rechts finden Sie Schaltflächen, mit denen Sie z. B. Steuerelemente löschen, Ihre Aktionen rückgängig bzw. wiederholen können oder das Umbrechen von Steuerelementen beeinflussen.
The form preview. On the right you’ll find buttons for deleting control elements, undoing or repeating actions, and changing the wrapping behavior of control elements.
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When you place a control element, its properties open on the right-hand side, allowing you to define labels and content, insert images, and adjust fonts, positioning and size.
Simply create your own forms with the form designer in objectiF RPM
