Future of Requirement Management Tools

I've been looking at Requirement Management tools for 5 years now.

Requirement Management tools are all evolving towards a common view. They now offer the same kind of functionalities, in a similar way.

For instance, a few years ago, for most of the tools, the way to present requirements was only available as a list of requirements title. To look at the requirements details, you had to click on the specific requirement.
Now most of them, are offering a "word document view", where requirements can be displayed as a word document with chapters.

In the future, my feeling, is that what will be important is, not the functionalities offered by the tool itself, but the level of integration with test management, change/bug management and code source file management tools.

One of the main functionality of a Requirement Management tool is traceability. Traceability between marketing and technical requirements and specifications. This is today handled correctly by most RM tools, but an advantage comes when you can also link requirements with tests and build some test coverage tools for instance.

And we can go further by extending tracceability to changes/bugs and even source file.

Here is a view that summarizes my point:

One of CMMI Requirement Management specific practice says: ["SP 1.4 Maintain Bidirectional Traceability of Requirements" - Maintain bidirectional traceability among the requirements and work products.].
Using closely linked/integrated test management, change/bug management and code source file management tools is an "easy" way to achieve this goal.

Here is a very interesting presentation I saw in London a few weeks ago at CMMI Made Practical Conference 2009:

Delivering on CMMI® with Agile Methods

In 2008, the SEI published a Technical Note, CMMI® and Agile: Why not embrace both! This new publication sought to explain why there was misunderstanding and distrust between both the CMMI® and Agile communities and how they could be reconciled. In 2009, the movement to consolidate agile methods with the CMMI® model is in full swing. This presentation will summarize the technical note and present an agile implementation of CMMI® based on the Microsoft MSF for CMMI® Process Improvement methodology developed by the presenter in 2005. The method uses W. Edwards Deming's Theory of Profound Knowledge and his 14 Points for Management to reconcile agile methods with the CMMI® model, and generates most of the evidence for a SCAMPI appraisal automatically with the development tools.

Speakers were:

David J. Anderson , David Anderson and Associates
Hillel Glazer , CEO Entinex Inc.

All models are false but some models are useful

George E. P. Box said:"All models are false but some models are useful..."


My CMMI related white papers.