Rational Requirements Composer / Rational DOORS Requirements Professional

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You can download and try Rational Requirements Composer for 60 days.

Understanding client needs and defining good requirements

Projects rarely rise above the quality of their requirements. Effectively engaging stakeholders -- early and often -- in defining and validating requirements improves the likelihood that projects will deliver what customers need. This is true whatever the project methodology (waterfall, iterative or agile) and whatever the names of requirements artifacts (stories, use cases, functional and non-functional requirements, etc.).

• Many kinds of artifacts are needed to express requirements and related organizational context and constraints; these artifacts are created in various tools and data formats. They can be almost anything: spreadsheets, presentations, snapshots of whiteboard sessions, or recordings from Web conferences. Requirements Composer provides a way to bring these "information islands" together, relate them with hyperlinks, tags, attributes, and collections, have conversations around them, and evolve them as the team develops greater understanding of the real, important requirements.
• As a project team defines what it needs to accomplish, Requirements Composer helps the team naturally move from unstructured ideas expressed in presentations, pictures and documents to structured, actionable requirements expressed as stories, use cases, declarative requirements, work items and tests.
• Requirements Composer includes editors for use cases, user interface sketches and storyboards, process diagrams, rich text documents, and integrated glossaries. Analysts and others who author documents have all of these tools available, with similar user interfaces, in one location, using a common repository.
• User interface storyboards provide a way to express user scenarios intuitively, much like movie producers use storyboards to communicate concepts before filming begins. In Requirements Composer sketches and storyboards employ reusable parts, which can dramatically reduce the effort required to build storyboards and ensures consistency when modifying a group of wireframe mock-ups.
• A Web client allows easy access for stakeholders and occasional users to view, review, comment on, and approve requirements artifacts and sets of artifacts.

UI Collaboration Comments and links Web dashboard Composite documents

Collaborative ALM for team alignment and visibility

Collaborative application lifecycle management (CALM) integrations empower teams with in-context collaboration on project artifacts, web-like artifact navigation, and status tracking across team and project repositories.

• Relate requirements in Requirements Composer with work items in Rational Team Concert and test plans and results in Rational Quality Manager.
• From within Requirements Composer create "implemented by" and "validated by" links, see references to the related work items and test cases, hover over them for summary information, or follow links to open those artifacts in the other tools. Dashboard viewlets can pull data directly from Team Concert and Quality Manager.
• Developers and testers can use similar capabilities to create, see and use requirements information in Requirements Composer from within the user interfaces of Team Concert and Quality Manager.

CALM overview
Dashboard viewlets
Test information in RRC

Other product integrations

• Product managers, the marketing team, business process owners, project managers and business analysts are among those holding the initial conversations to identify project goals and high level scope. They benefit from productive collaboration, minimal structure to the process, and the ability to express and evolve ideas quickly. On the other hand, in many domains project delivery requires controlled requirements practices and sophisticated traceability. Requirements Composer can be combined with Rational RequisitePro or Rational DOORS to provide an optimized environment for both.
• Developers and architects doing solution modeling benefit from referencing and extending requirements artifacts. Use cases and process diagrams can be imported into Rational Software Modeler and Rational Software Architect for design elaboration.
• RAVEN Visual Analyzer for Rational Requirements Composer helps analysts find and fix poor and missing requirements.
• Visual definition through simulation is a proven technique in requirements definition. iRise Connect for Rational Requirements Composer makes iRise simulations instantly accessible within Requirements Composer.

For more information on integration scenarios and their status see Rational Requirements Composer 2.0 Integrations.