What is Requirement Management? Top 13 Tools for Requirement Management

Introduction

There is a popular saying in the IT industry that one of the keys to delivering high-quality products is to get the requirements right. You must be confused here what we meant by “right” requirements and what are the best practices to get there. But keep in mind that requirements management is critical to project success. This blog is curated in such a way that you can use it as a self-learning material so et’s go ahead and learn more about these requirement tools in detail.

What is Requirement Management?

A requirement is simply a stated need or desire. Take the example of a fictitious library system, here requirement could be that the library system should allow the people to check-in and check-out books. Requirements Management is the process to manage and capture different needs that different stakeholders have in a system. Sometimes, needs relate to the functionality, and other times it may be technical needs.

There is no correct set of features to have in a requirement management software. It depends on your organization, the type of system you want to build, and many other unique aspects you will be following throughout a project life-cycle. Here are the certain set of features that should be part of any requirement management tool.

• The tool should be able to enter requirements, use cases, user stories with an easy web user interface.
• The tool should be able to derive technical tasks in detail to develop a project development schedule.
• The tool should be able to connect requirements with acceptance testing so that features can be tested adequately before the development work is completed.
• The tool should be able to give a visual representation of data to help with requirements development.
• The tool should support the real-time collaboration and feedback during requirements violation.
• The tool should support personalized dashboards, customized reporting, workflows, and custom fields etc.

A Spreadsheet or Word document is a good tool to start with when you have a limited number of requirements. For a large number of requirements, you might need more powerful requirement tools. Requirements change frequently and they are easy to manage with a right set and with some of the best requirement management tools and techniques. In the next section, we will discuss popular tools for requirement management that are frequently used by enterprises.

Best 13 Tools for Requirement Management

There are a plethora of requirement management tools available in the market, so this is difficult to choose the right one. Here is the list of best requirement management tools to look upon in 2019.

1). Visure

Visure is a requirement management tool suitable for all sizes industries and business verticals. The objective of the tool is to implement requirements efficiently and aims at delivering a high-quality product as per client needs and requirements.

Features:

• It supports various life lifecycle models like agile, V-model, waterfall etc.
• It offers roundtrip integration with MS-Word and Ms-Excel.
• It supports collaborative signoff for review and approval process.
• It offers bug tracking, test management, risk management etc. using Natural Language Processing and semantic analysis.

2). Modern Requirements

This tool is recognized worldwide for its collaborative environment that reduces the overall time to delivery by providing users with end-to-end traceability, process documentation, document authoring, and visualization support etc.

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Features:

• It is an inspired BA-assisted tool that allows customizable document generation with three popular visualization options like diagrams, mock-ups, and use cases etc.
• It supports online reviews and approval processes. The major highlights of the tool include impact assessment, user story generation, test case automation and more.
• It offers pre-defined templates, customizable dashboards, online document authoring etc.

3). ReQtest

ReQtest is a cloud-based requirement management tool that offers end-to-end traceability. This is a preferred ALM tool while working with business, marketing, functional, UI, non-functional requirements. It has a customizable requirement module that helps you to review and track changes instantly.

Features:

• It organizes, review, and prioritize requirements intuitively.
• It is well suited for agile requirements management.
• It offers an agile board for effortless requirement tracking.
• It offers customized fields to track status values.
• It attaches mockups, design documents, or any other helpful file with requirements.
• It filters or organizes data in a pie chart with a single click.

4). IRIS Business Architect

It allows business owners to plan, deliver, and implement their corporate strategies in a well-defined manner. It provides rich functionality, design, and modeling to track changes quickly. It contributes to cut down risks and enhances the overall decision-making process too.

Features:

• It is a user-friendly tool with easy to use features.
• It allows for easy collaboration among different cloud services.
• It has wonderful features for history tracking.
• It offers complete status reporting, summary reports, traceability options, and user-defined attributes.

5). Rational Doors

It is a requirement management tool for optimizing, verifying, and collaborating requirements across different departments of an organization. It allows you to capture, analyze, and trace changes to information.

Features:

• Requirements management is possible through a centralized location for better team collaboration.
• Requirements can be quickly connected to design items, test cases, test plans etc whenever needed.
• There is a scalability option to address changes requirements and management needs.
• There is a test tracking toolkit to test environments manually and to link requirements with test cases.
• There is a predefined change proposal system for a more customized change control workflow.

6). Accompa

It is a requirement management tool or software application that helps to capture, track, or manage requirements for multiple products or projects. It is a cloud-based system and there is no need to download and install.

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Features:

• It can store or manage requirements to a central repository.
• It can be customized based on needs or specifications.
• It allows the automatic gathering of requirements, detects, and track changes as well as dependencies.
• It shares requirements that can be collaborated in the real-time.
• It prioritizes requirements based on semantic analysis.
• It saves time for requirement management and eliminates unnecessary hurdles.

7). Innoslate

It is another useful requirement management tool that allows users to create or manage documents quickly. It can edit or review requirements directly in the requirement view.

Features:

• This is an easy to use tool with 24/7 customer support.
• It analyses requirements using natural language processing methodology.
• It captures requirements quickly from other tools with the help of import analyzer.
• It manages project changes, versions, baselines in a proper manner.
• It extends or customizes according to project needs.
• It runs on various devices like MAC, PC, or android etc.

8). Gatherspace

It is the first hosted on-demand web-based requirement management solution that helps to address the problems of project management failures.

Features:

• It supports easy report generation, issues tracking, REST API etc.
• It allows role-based permissions, commenting, or collaboration etc.

9). Enterprise Architect

It is a requirement management tool that integrates seamlessly with other development tools by creating requirements in the model.

Features:

• It allows building maintainable and robust systems where extremely large systems can be loaded in seconds.
• It collaborates effectively and offers maximum traceability.
• It improves the overall business outcomes and manages complex data effectively.
• It allows document generation with a single click.

10). Polarion Requirements

It is a requirement management tool that approves, gathers, or manages requirements for complex projects during the project life cycle.

Features:

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• It allows requirements display to all stakeholders for review, development, and approval.
• It imports existing assets quickly with the help of rule-based import wizard.
• It supports offline collaboration so that changes made outside the tool can be incorporated seamlessly.
• It invites stakeholders to sign specific documents as reviewed or approved automatically.
• It offers unified solutions for building test cases in parallel with requirements.

11). Agile Manager

It is a requirement management tool that plans, executes, or manages agile projects. It also helps to remove latencies, adopt continuous improvements using the SaaS model.

• It allows easy task allocation and capacity management.
• It allows getting quick insights from the entire project.
• It offers advanced analytics options to aggregate the source code.
• It empowers and aligns teams to work together in order to achieve business objectives.
• It offers the code with maximum quality as per standards.

12). Tosca TestSuite

Tosca is a requirement management tool that accelerates testing to keep pace with Agile and DevOps. It always used most innovative and functional technologies for project deployment.

Features:

• It supports model-based test automation and extendable technological adaptors.
• It allows image-based test automation and all types of testing either it is manual, automated, or hybrid.

13). iPlan

It is a requirement management tool that helps organizations to manage the entire project lifecycle. It also helps organizations to plan or manage their project processes.

Features:

• It is responsible to manage the enterprise project portfolio.
• It is supported by project managers and domain experts.
• It increases the overall productivity of an organization.
• It automates CMMI metric generation for all kinds of projects.
• It reduces the project management overhead and cuts down redundancy, data collection, and collation efforts.

We have covered all the necessary requirement management softwares. If you are confused between which one to choose, you can opt to take demo sessions of each one of them to understand their working better.

Conclusion

For successful delivery of a project, requirements should be in its best place. Further, it helps to accelerate the user satisfaction and application delivery in minimum time with minimum issues. Tools for Requirement management work best here to reduce the overall manual efforts and optimize the business outcomes with its additional features. You just need to pick the best requirements management tools out of the pool of business requirements tools and it should be the one that suits your business requirements the most.

Now that you have an idea about what requirement management software is all about, you can move ahead and learn more about it at Janbask Training. You can also sign up for various relevant courses that will boost your knowledge about all the business requirements tools.

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