What Are Requirements Management Tools
From Requirements Management School
A requirements management tool is a software system that helps you manage the various manually intensive tasks in the requirements development and requirements management processes. Good requirements management tools (RM Tools) can help your team to save time and increase their productivity among other benefits.
When to Use Requirements Management Tools: Based on "Number of Requirements"
Small projects with less than 200 requirements can be usually managed using spreadsheets, wikis or simple databases. However, best practice would suggest that in order to preserve the requirements knowledge-base of the organization, a lightweight or middleweight requirements management tool be used. This ensures that historical data from previous projects is always at your fingertips.
Medium-sized projects with 200-2000 requirements usually need to look for a commercial tool. Internally created spreadsheets and databases simply do not provide the diverse functionality and robustness of commercial requirements management tools.
Large projects with over 2000 requirements necessitate the use of robust commercial requirements management tools. Otherwise, such projects are likely to suffer from unnecessary project delays and defects.
When to Use Requirements Management Tools: Based on "Size of Project Team"
Perhaps a far better measure for most organizations is the number of personnel involved in a software development project.
For projects with less than 5 personnel all of whom are co-located, a commercial requirements management tool is often not needed. Spreadsheets, word processors, wikis or even index cards would suffice.
Larger teams, especially teams distributed across multiple cities or even countries, can often benefit immensely from using good requirements management tools.
Types of Requirements Management Tools
Most requirements management tools share the same core functions. They provide a document repository hosted on top of a relational or object oriented database which provides for multi-party editing. The solution will generally fall into one of two categories either database or document centric.
There are different types of solutions targeted at different markets. The most commonly available solutions can be classified into:
Heavyweight Requirements Management Tools - The heavy hitter category in the market. This is an all in one fully integrated solution which manages the requirements management lifecycle from end to end. These solutions require heavy investment; process re-engineering; possible culture changes in order to reap the benefits.
Example of Heavyweight: IBM Rational RequisitePro
Middleweight Requirement Management Tools – Middleweight solutions are tailored towards medium-sized organizations and medium-sized business units within large organizations who need a solution “out of the box”. There are no high consultancy charges associated with setting up this type of tools as they usually come with a fully defined set of processes already configured. Middle weight solutions usually offer scalability; flexibility; and ease-of-use.
Example of Middleweight: Accompa Requirements Management Tool
Lightweight Requirement Management Tools – These are best for use in small companies or on small projects where there is no process already in place. They can be anything from the use of spreadsheets, databases, email based collaborations, and lightweight solutions that provide wiki type collaborative workspaces. They are often very inexpensive or even free, but most organizations tend to outgrow such tools quickly.
