Bulk loading comments from Excel
In the context of sharing requirements with an external party.
We do not allow access to our internal resources by extrernal parties, not uncommon. However, just as we do internally, there is a natural progression of developing a set of requirements from draft through agreed and approved in collaboration with these external parties.
Internally during this development phase, we capture our requirements in RRC and render a document that is emailed securely for their review. Currently (non-RRC), this is supported using the Word track changes as the document is updated and exchanged.
Using the new RRC approach, we've discussed whether this could be addressed using CSV import and/or ReqIF. If we have them capture their comments in Excel, include the Artefact ID together with their comments, is it possible to import and attach these comments using either CSV import or ReqIF?
Assuming CSV import can't do this directly, could we develop a pre-process script to reformat into ReqIF?
2 answers
Comments
While I agree this is plausible, I would be concerned about mixing concepts, where we teach the teams to look for comments in the Comments panel but sometimes comments may also be found in the Links panel. Plus, seeing an artefact type in the Create Artifact menu called "Comment" or possibly having them show up on the Dashboard as "changed requirements" rather than "Recent Comments" would be tricky to talk around. It seems to get messy in a hurry.
But, I appreciate the thinking outside the box! ;-)
I can speak to the ReqIF scenario. This can't be done directly with the RRC comments as comments are not part of the ReqIF spec. One solution when using ReqIF workflows is to use attributes record comments. For instance, you might have an attribute named "OEM Comments" and perhaps another for "Supplier Comments". These attributes are then used to add comments by various parties. Since these are simply attributes, they are handled inherently in ReqIF (or CSV) exchange. It works well when exchanging requirements, although you don't get the threaded conversations as are possible with native RRC comments.
Tom