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A requirements management tool helps you to store the different requirements, prioritize them and manage different versions of them. Using a requirements tool you can also trace relationships between different requirements.

Textual requirements specifications are full of text, but also numbers. We tend to think that the most important content of a requirements specification are the actions expected as the translation of the high level needs, the main systems and subsystems after a system decomposition, stakeholder names… but we also find numbers on such documents.

Did you know? When it comes to requirements patterns, both good and bad requirements patterns are valuable for analyzing quality. Requirements Quality Analyzer RQA, in version 2014, includes a very interesting feature to define parameterized metrics. Those parameterized metrics are seamlessly integrated together with the rest of out-of-the-box metrics, and provides the end user an easy to use extensibility to describe your own metrics.

Did you know? RAT v2014 is now able to connect to different requirements repositories. Unlike RAT version 4.x that was only available for IBM DOORS, RAT v2014 is able to connect to IBM DOORS, Visure REQUIREMENTS, CATIA Reqtify and Microsoft Excel. Furthermore, RAT now comes in different flavours:

Requirements are, without a doubt, better managed with a “real” Requirements Management System (RMS) than with an office tool. Despite of that, and despite of the fact that we have already issued a list of the most common requirements management tools, we’re glad to offer a template based on Excel for your requirements.

Did you know? The quality of your requirements can be assessed automatically while you are sleeping.

The Requirements Quality Suite (RQA) cannot only analyze your requirements quality on the fly; it can also assess your requirements off-line. The RQA Synchronizer is in charge of this functionality, by performing an off-line assessment. A scheduled task can be created to run RQA Synchronizer at any time and in a regular basis.

knowledgeMANAGER, our tool for ontology management, comes with some classical types of relationships; parent-child, related... are some classical types of relationships for thesauri and ontologies.

Aside of those types, it's very easy to add and manage new types of relationships, known as semantics in the current version of knowledgeMANAGER. Furthermore, it's very easy to import concepts, from an external source, that are related using this new type of relationships. 

Did you know? Reducing inconsistencies between requirements is an easy way to reduce your project costs.

Thanks to the ontology-based semantic analysis that RQS (Requirements Quality Suite) is able to perform; now you can automatically find these inconsistencies in your project requirements.

Thinking ontologies, what is the difference between a term being an instance of a class and a term being specialized from another term?

Systems Engineering has plenty of challenges today, and one of them, at least for me, is to improve the quality of the overall system and its associated life cycle work products. In The REUSE Company we are committed to produce processes, methods and tools for quality management (up to now in regards to Requirements) based on the application of Ontologies.

This blog is all about how to write *good* requirements but…. what does *good* mean? I’m sure that the characteristics of a good requirement are different from one company to the other.