As a member of the Rational Requirements Composer product delivery team, working closely with customers and the IBM sales teams, I have the opportunity to see patterns in the challenges that teams are facing.  Considering this from the perspective of requirements and the people who create, refine, and use them to guide their work, these challenges include the following:

• Does the team have a good understanding of the outcomes that the project needs to deliver?
• Does the team understand and agree on how those outcomes will be delivered?
• What does each person need to do, and by when?
• Can we be confident that we are all working to the same requirements? And when the requirements change, are we adapting to the change in a consistent, coherent way?
• How far along are we in meeting our requirements? What is left to do?  Where are the greatest risks?

With the introduction of  Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management (C/ALM), it has become easier to answer many of these questions.

Below is a short video showing a simple example of a business analyst using this solution to develop a set of business requirements and relating them to Release, Iteration, and Test plans. All members of the team (analyst, developers, and testers) use their normal tool of choice, thus ensuring that the developed solution is delivered and validated as defined by the requirements. The demo is not exhaustive. See the C/ALM features page for more detail.

The products used in this demo:

• Rational Requirements Composer 2.0
• Rational Team Concert 2.0.0.2
• Rational Quality Manager 2.0.0.1 ifix 2

To learn more about supported product versions, see the C/ALM versions page.

Process used:

• IBM Practices for Agile Delivery

For further information:

• RRC product Help: Creating and monitoring C/ALM associations
• Video:  RRC 2.0: Working in Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management
• Demo: Use RRC & Rational Quality Manager to align business with IT
• Presentation: Implementing Agile Requirements using RRC with C/ALM