It has arrived! The new fixpack for Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) 3.0.1.1 provides the first opportunity for Rational RequisitePro customers to move existing requirements into RRC and use them in Rational’s newest Requirements Definition and Management tool. The fixpack was made available on October 17th here on jazz.net.

Some of you will know that in the past we provided an integration between RequsitePro and Requirements Composer 2.x that enables teams who defined requirements in RRC to use the management functionality in ReqPro to analyze and report on their project requirements.

Next Generation of requirements definition and management

Over the past year we began talking about RRC as the “next generation requirements definition and management solution” which would offer all the definition and management capability in a single Jazz-based RM tool and part of Collaborative Lifecycle Management. In June we released RRC 3.0.1 in June 2011, and we have been getting great customer feedback on it.

What is in the new fixpack?

In Requirements Composer 3.0.1.1 you can now import your RequisitePro project data, types, links, traceability, attributes, Microsoft Word documents, discussions, views, RQM-RequisitePro links, etc. (see the New and Noteworthy for a comprehensive list). There are some limitations, including user group migration, granular access rights, package security, and suspect link information (see the complete list ). We also only support the migration to new RRC projects at this time so for any former integrated RequisitePro and RRC projects you will require a different consideration.

This fixpack also delivers some highly anticipated capabilities, including multi-enumerated attributes and the ability to report on graphical artifacts (not previously available in the RRC reporting API). There is also a wide range of quality and performance improvements.

What ReqPro concepts are we missing?

Most of the high priority capabilities used by RequisitePro customers can be found in RRC V3.0.1.1 but there are a few outstanding concepts that we plan to address in later RRC releases. So while RRC is ready for most RequsitePro customers, it might not be ready for everyone. In the spirit of open development on jazz.net it’s our plan to continue to work hard to close out on these last few remaining functions in future releases. If it’s not ready for your project today please continue to work with us and watch our upcoming releases.

We are still missing some capabilities including suspect link, fine-grain access rights (lower than at the project level), two-way Microsoft Word document integration, requirements renumbering, Baseline compare, and some integrations. If your organization absolutely requires these functions in your requirements tool today then we ask you consider RRC in a future release.

Even with these gaps however we certainly want to encourage every RequisitePro customer to look at RRC, consider what it has to offer, and give us feedback. While RRC may lack capability in a small number of areas compared to RequisitePro, we believe it exceeds RequisitePro in many others with its rich web-based editing, visual requirements, and collaboration tools (just to name a few). Many who have examined RRC have been excited about the promising new outlook it provides to support fast-paced development teams using agile, iterative and waterfall development processes especially when used with the other tools in the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management. (Rational Team Concert and Rational Quality Manager). If you’ve not been involved on our RRC forum please see for yourself what others have been saying.

What about RequisitePro?

RequisitePro is still being developed, supported, and delivering quarterly maintenance releases. We anticipate customer usage for many years to come (see the latest ReqPro 7.1.3 release). The option to migrate data from RequisitePro to RRC now provides a future path for RequisitePro customers and an opportunity to take advantage of Collaborative Lifecycle Management today.

Jared Pulham
Senior Product Manager, Requirements Management Tools