Unifying Requirements Management and the Software Development Lifecycle
Requirements may be the most critical aspect of the software development lifecycle. If requirements are wrong or not clearly communicated, the system will ultimately be flawed. Experts note that 80 percent of software projects are at risk due to creeping requirements. Therefore managing changing requirements must be an integral part of the development process, and is vital to mitigating risk on large projects.
MKS Integrity for Requirements Management enables engineering and IT organizations to address the primary causes of software project failures. Built on the foundation of a single application lifecycle management platform, MKS Integrity for Requirements Management enables organizations to capture and validate software requirements, link them to downstream development and testing activities and to manage their completion through a unified process across the lifecycle.
Unlike other requirements management solutions, MKS Integrity for Requirements Management goes beyond traditional authoring and traceability providing requirements change management and new capabilities for requirements reuse, enabling the business to improve agility, visibility and minimize project risk.
| “In an upset, the three year-old requirements management capabilities in MKS’s ALM solution turned in the highest current offering score in our evaluation... The product includes outstanding support for Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel as requirements input mechanisms and superior support for requirements reuse (both core requirements management capabilities) in addition to great strength in security, workflow, and reporting (all typical capabilities of an ALM solution).” - Forrester Research, “The Forrester Wave: Requirements Management, Q2 2008" |
Requirements Change Management
Requirements are constantly changing and dynamic, and the needs of the organization are also constantly changing and dynamic – one of the biggest challenges is being able to asses, react and communicate that level of change. MKS Integrity fosters collaboration between business users generating requirements and the developers, keeping all stakeholders informed of changes to requirements throughout the development process.
Unified requirements change management allows for individual requirements or documents to follow their own lifecycle path. Requirements can evolve, branch or change where authorization permits while MKS Integrity maintains a complete audit trail of every change.
Podcast: Requirements Change Management
A New Concept: Requirements Reuse
Development teams have software configuration management tools to support parallel development, baselining of software configurations and reuse of software components. Today's sophisticated requirements management users have a similar need to associate and reuse requirements in a parallel development scenario while maintaining traceability throughout the lifecycle. MKS is the only requirements management vendor today to offer capabilities for requirements reuse, and no other vendors have a product architecture that can support real requirements reuse in the near term.
White paper: Real Reuse for Requirements
MKS Integrity for Requirements Management Capabilities
- Requirements Change Management - Through process and workflow or through authorization and assignment the ability to control who, what, when and where change happens, the impact of that change and how both are communicated outward.
- Requirements Configuration Management – True versioning, branching and baselines of requirements and requirements documents enable you to reuse these assets at any point in the lifecycle and leverage the investments across projects.
Requirements Traceability – The ability to link artifacts within the repository to others either up or downstream, across projects or through time provides tremendous value to automating communications, discovering and addressing the impact of change and calculating metrics to aid in decision making.
- Requirements Authoring – A streamlined user interface for capturing the rich content of requirements within documents, lists or hierarchical structures coupled with integrations into productivity tools such as Microsoft Word and Excel.
- Requirements Visibility and Metrics – Complete visibility across roles, projects and users and metrics calculated at every stage of the life-cycle and surfaced through reports, charts and dashboards to enable greater and more timely decision making.
- Architecture and Administration – Enterprise architecture to support unparalleled scalability and performance in a process controlled globally collaborative environment with centralized administration.
MKS Integrity for Requirements Management is the only solution to fully satisfy Forrester Research’s criteria for a requirements management tool. Read the independent report.
Requirements Management Resources:
Datasheet: MKS Integrity for Requirements Management
White Paper: An Innovative Approach to Managing Software Requirements
Webinar Demonstration: MKS Integrity for Requirements Management - Solution Demonstration
