The new February 2016 version of our list of requirements tools is available. It contains a total of 111 requirements management tools. The previous version dated back from May 2015. Several vendors have since released new versions of their tools that we have referenced in the list.
From the 111 tools overall, we feature 25 in a list of selected tools. The selection is based on indicators of market share and market presence.
The extensions and updates to the February 2016 release of our RM tools list include:
- All tools have been checked for availability and up-to-date web links to tool and vendor pages
- Some tools have been added, some tool entries have been changed
(e.g., product name changes, company acquisitions, new product bundles) - Several outdated ones have been deleted
- All tools have been supplied with up-to-date version information (where available) and assigned to the relevant tool categories (e.g., RD, RM, Agile)
Overall, we got the impression that tool vendors focused in the second half of the year more on consolidation activities than creating new functionality. Atlassian for example merged two of their flagship products JIRA and JIRA Agile into a single one now called “JIRA Software”.
It will be interesting to see whether vendors will focus in the first half of 2016 on releases with new functionality.
The following tools have received major updates between May 2015 to February 2016, with associated changes of their main version numbers:
- Rational Doors Next Generation from 5.0.2 to 6.0.1
- JIRA 6.4 to JIRA Software 7.1.0
- Kovair ALM Studio from 7.0 to 8.0
- Mingle from 14.2 to 15.2
- VersionOne from 15.0.9 to 16.0.2.180
Interesting changes occurred with regard to tool vendors: Polarion announced that it will be acquired by Siemens (look up the Polarion announcement and the Siemens press release). Hewlett-Packard has been restructured and split off into two companies (press release). The enterprise software business is now part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Rally was acquired by CA (press release). Its tool has been renamed into “CA Agile Central”. IBM Rational Focal Point has been acquired by UNICOM Global (press release).
Concerning the set of tools included in the list, we have performed the following changes during our January and February 2016 updates.
Added:
- ScrumWorks Pro
- TraceCloud
These additions have been proposed by readers of the RM tools list who help us keeping the market survey up to date. We want to express our special thanks to Heather Cotton who has pointed us to ScrumWorks Pro, and to Christopher Karr for the link to TraceCloud.
Renamed / Rebranded:
- HP Agile Manager into Agile Manager
- Rally into CA Agile Central
- IBM Rational Focal Point into just Focal Point (now owned by UNICOM Global)
- HP Quality Center/ALM into HPE ALM/Quality Center
- JIRA into JIRA Software, as a result of integration with JIRA Agile (formerly an add-on product)
Removed:
- ALMComplete – product discontinued by vendor
- JIRA Agile – now part of JIRA Software
- Poseidon for UML – product appears not to be maintained any more; the last change to the product web site has been in 2010
- Tormigo – product discontinued by vendor
Included into the list of selected tools:
- in-STEP RED
Over the next weeks you will find related blog posts on MakingOfSoftware.com. They will contain updates on selected tools and observations from the tool market that we have collected during our ongoing research.