Tag: requirements management

Overview of VersionOne Updates

VersionOne is one of the leading agile tools that we feature in our list of requirements management tools. In an earlier blog post from 2015, we surveyed its then latest developments. These were: Epic Dependency Visualization, Strategic Themes, Epic Timeline Drilldown and Scorecards.

Now we find it’s time for an update. Since spring 2015, VersionOne has delivered several builds, bundled into 3 major release streams named Summer 2015, Fall 2015, and recently in January the Winter 2016 release.

This blog post highlights and summarizes some of the major capabilities that have been added in the timeframe since our previous blog. Note that feature capabilities depend on the VersionOne edition chosen by an organization. For an overview of the four editions Team, Catalyst, Enterprise and Ultimate look up the VersionOne edition overview.

The Summer release 2015 provided enhanced visibility about commit information. The CommitStream TeamRoom panel provides the stream of commit data relevant to all work items for the entire list of repositories that has been configured. The panel can be configured by users to view only the repository commit information they are interested in.

Project management support has been enhanced by introducing budgeting capabilities. Total capacity may be allocated to the entire organization for a certain timeframe and then split into project based budget segments. The Fall release 2016 added capabilities to set budget for strategic themes. These capabilities are available under the topic of portfolio planning.

The Winter release 2016 added a Timesheet feature which allows team members to enter time spent on work items in an environment they are used to. The Timesheet page displays a team members time tracked against items for an entire week.

Reporting capabilities got enhanced in every release. The Summer release 2015 provided additional scorecards, like TeamRoom Scorecard and Iteration Scorecard.

The Winter 2016 release provided a new dashboard at the enterprise level. This Enterprise Dashboard visualizes organizational metrics in the categories: Throughput, Responsiveness, Quality, and Predictability.

DevOps has become a major theme in recent years. As a strategic response to that VersionOne acquired ClearCode Labs to add continuous delivery and automation functionality into its product offering. In the Summer release 2016 DevOps Center was added to the VersionOne product as a first step.

In the Winter release 2016, VersionOne announced that DevOps release automation is now available as a separate product named: Continuum. Continuum helps with automating, orchestrating and visualizing the flow of releases and their associated changes from inception to delivery.

As a consequence, the company VersionOne now offers two products:

  • VersionOne Lifecyle – Agile project and portfolio planning, tracking and reporting
  • VersionOne Continuum – Continuous delivery automation, orchestration and visualization

Kanban support in team rooms is now available. Teams are no longer required to have an open sprint/iteration. TeamRooms can now be configured as “iterationless”, which allows for true Kanban support.

Summary

VersionOne continuously broadens its capabilities in their already rich featured agile tool. From our point of view, it delivers one of the most complete solutions for agile teams. While they have added impressive support for large scale agile development in recent years, they did not neglect to refactor and streamline their core offerings as triggered by requests from their user base.

New Version of Requirements Tools List Available

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.

Requirements for JIRA Added to RM Tools List

Are there any requirements management add-ons for Atlassian JIRA? Yes, there are. This article introduces one of them: Requirements for JIRA by ease solutions Pte Ltd. We added Requirements for JIRA together with another JIRA add-on, RMsis from Optimizory Technologies Pvt. Ltd (view brief tool overview), to our list of requirements management (RM) tools during our latest May 2015 update.

Availability and Vendor

Requirements for JIRA is an add-on product to Atlassian JIRA on-premise installations. It extends JIRA concepts and UI elements by specific requirements management features.

Requirements for JIRA is quite fresh on the market with its initial release 2.2.0 from March 2015 and two updates since then. The current version is 2.3.0. Its vendor ease solutions is a Singapore-based IT service provider with a track record as Atlassian partner including JIRA customization and development, and with a history of requirements-related service offerings. Requirements for JIRA has been their first JIRA add-on product made available on Atlassian Marketplace. Recently, they launched a second product there, a JIRA add-on for supporting JIRA administration.

Features and Characteristics

Notable features of Requirements for JIRA are:

  • Rich and flexible requirements structures
  • Various requirements-specific views and diagrams
  • Requirements revisions and baselines
  • Requirements reuse
  • Round-trip export/import of Microsoft Excel spreadsheet files

Information model: Requirements for JIRA plugs into the basic JIRA information model and extends it by additional concepts useful for requirements management. The central concept and basic information structure is a user-defined folder hierarchy (aka “requirements tree”). Any existing JIRA issue can be assigned to a folder and new issues can be created within folders. All issues that belong to this folder structure can use the features of Requirements for JIRA. Other important concepts of the information model are suspect flags on JIRA links, indicating potential impact of a requirements change on other dependent requirements, and baselines on the requirements hierarchy or on parts of it.

User interface: The Requirements for JIRA user interface adds a “Requirements” entry to the main JIRA menu line that provides access to several requirements-specific views. The main requirements view shows the requirements folder hierarchy and a reading view similar to a specification document. Additional views include requirements coverage, trace diagram, baseline comparison, and others.

Tool Assessment

Requirements for JIRA brings a wide spectrum of important and useful requirements management features to Atlassian JIRA and integrates them quite smoothly into the existing JIRA functionality. This is my impression after having studied the documentation and from a brief trial usage.

User documentation appears suitable for making a first acquaintance with the tool. Advanced features are not explained in much detail, which calls for exploring the lean and relatively intuitive user interface during trial usage. However, it is remarkable that such a young tool does include so many advanced features like coverage view, roundtrip export/import, and requirements reuse.

Overall, when looking for specific requirements management support in Atlassian JIRA, Requirements for JIRA can be an interesting candidate. It might be particularly attractive for organizations that want to extend JIRA usage across the development lifecycle starting with solid requirements practices, and that are prepared to act as early adopters.

Information Resources

Product Homepage at Atlassian Marketplace: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.easesolutions.jira.plugins.requirements

Product Homepage at Vendor Site: http://easesolutions.com/jira-requirements-management/

Product Documentation: https://easesolutions.atlassian.net/wiki/pages/viewpage.action;?pageId=5406725

RMsis New on RM Tools List

With the latest May 2015 update of our list of requirements management (RM) tools we newly included two requirements solutions that are add-on products to Atlassian JIRA: RMsis by Optimizory Technologies Pvt. Ltd. and Requirements for JIRA by ease solutions Pte Ltd. This blog article introduces RMsis. Requirements for JIRA will follow in a separate article.

RMsis Availability and Vendor

RMsis is an add-on product to Atlassian JIRA on-premise installations. It plugs into JIRA as a separate sub-product coming with its own user interface, data structures, user roles, and access rights. JIRA issues can be linked from RMsis items (e.g., requirements), and RMsis items can be exported into JIRA issues. Besides RM functionality, RMsis provides support for testing.

The initial release 0.2 of RMsis was made available in October 2010. The current major release 1.8.0 dates from March 2015 with two additional updates since. RMsis vendor Optimizory is located in New Delhi, with consulting partners in Singapore, India, Germany, the Benelux countries, and Turkey.

RMsis Features, Information Model, and User Interface

Important features of RMsis according to the product page at Atlassian Marketplace are:

  • Flexible information model
  • Requirement versions, baselines, and branches
  • Cross project dependencies between requirements
  • Traceability between RMsis artifacts with JIRA artifacts and RMsis test cases

Information model: RMsis’s information model is based on a general type of requirement, which comes with a set of default attributes. Attribute values of these default attributes can be customized, and additional attribute types can be added. Requirements hierarchy can be expressed using parent/child relationships and via assignment of hierarchical tags. Child requirements are the actual items that contain detailed requirements information.

User interface: The main requirements view of the user interface is a tabular presentation similar to a spreadsheet table. There is one view for each of the two predefined requirements categories of unplanned and planned requirements. Within these table views, table columns correspond with requirements attribute types.

Tool Assessment

I could not run a trial-use of RMsis, yet. So the information provided in this article is based on the vendor’s sources available in the public domain, which are relatively rich and detailed.

While the list of RMsis product features is long, I am not always convinced of their implementation: Overall, RMsis makes some strong assumptions on requirements structure and process that cannot be changed. So, interested customers should carefully check whether the tool meets their way of working. One should also be aware that RMsis is a separate system running within JIRA, adding its own configuration needs and usage concepts. On the plus side are that RMsis has quite a long track record and a relatively large user base, and that it includes basic support for testing and test management.

Information Resources

Product homepage at Atlassian Marketplace: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.optimizory.rmsis.plugin.jira-rmsis

Product homepage at vendor site: http://products.optimizory.com/rmsis

Product documentation of latest release: http://docs.optimizory.com/display/rmsis/RMsis+Documentation+-+Latest+Release

agosense.requirements Added to RM list

In the recent May 2015 update of our list of requirements management (RM) tools, we added – among other tools – agonsense.requirements. This article briefly introduces the tool, which comes with some interesting new concepts. Over the next few weeks, we will publish similar articles for other tools that we have added to the RM tools list.

The company agosense is relatively young. It was established in 2009. Their initial product agosense.symphony is a process integration platform for software engineering tools across the application lifecycle. So, agosense have collected a lot of experience in connecting requirements management tools with other application lifecycle tools.

Based on their multi-year integration experience with many existing requirements management tools, they decided to create their own RM solution. In November 2014, they announced the first release of agosense.requirements. I had a chance to get some impressions about the tool in January 2015 where I participated at the company event agosense.CONNECT 2015.

agosense.requirements is a web based requirements management solution which is available on premise. It offers typical requirements management capabilities like requirement types, tracing of items, reporting, and rich text support for requirements to name a few. agosense summarizes the key features under the terms of: usability, processes and infrastructure advantages.

So, what are specific characteristics of agosense.requirements that make it special compared to other RM tools? I will highlight some tool capabilities under the topics of:

  • Change and Version Management
  • Tool Integrations
  • Cost of Ownership
  • Performance and Scalability

Change Management: By servicing many companies in their requirements integration approaches agosense came to the conclusion that an RM tool shall support strong change management capabilities. That’s why they focus on change management from the very beginning. Every requirement must be associated to a previously defined change request or task. Requirements are tracked in so-called sheets. Within those sheets requirements can be associated to change sets. Change sets can be versioned, and even branched. Changes between versions are tracked at the detail level and made available to users via various display options.

Tool Integrations: Tool integrations are a long-standing core competency of agosense. Using agosense.symphony a large collection of tools can be connected to agosense.requirements, too. Specifically for interchanging requirements between tools, agosense supports established interchange formats like OSLC or ReqIF.

Cost of Ownership: According to agosense, several features of agosense.requirements contribute to an overall small footprint. In particular, there is no separate purchase of a database required. The tool is delivered with an embedded NoSQL DB. agosense claims, that there were no extensive DB administration necessary using this technology. In addition, the user interface is purely based on web technology. It does not require client-based installations and can be used through all modern web browsers.

Performance and Scalability: Based on the chosen server technology and data model agosense claims to have the fastest RM solution on the market. The selected NoSQL technology allowed for scaling-up the RM solution with almost no administration effort by simply adding new nodes to the environment.

We find these capabilities impressive for such a young product. However, up to now, we could not yet evaluate how agosense delivers on these claims. We might well follow-up with running a detailed evaluation and trial usage sometime in the next months.
Look forward for more exciting news to come on MakingOfSoftware.com.

agosense.requirements Information Resources on the Web:

Product web page: http://www.agosense.com/agosenserequirements

Video about change management with agosense.requirements:

http://www.agosense.com/english/media-library/webinars/aenderungsbasiertes-rm-mit-jira