Capturing requirements from a Microsoft® Word® source document in Toolset
REQ Applications
The requirements management facilities in the Cradle-REQ module provides a comprehensive set of tools for all aspects of creating and engineering requirements over time in the context of a configuration management system.
The project schema would specify different requirement groups, normally including one or more of business requirements, operating requirements, user requirements, system requirements. These groups would typically be subdivided into types, including functional, performance, environmental, commercial and so on, and often organised by level (platform, system, subsystem, equipment, component, assembly or part), by stakeholder and by priority (mandatory, optional, desirable and so on). Further status attributes would be added as needed.
The initial capture of requirements is normally from external documents. Cradle-REQ provides two alternatives, either to capture from Word or Excel documents (including tables, figures and equations) using plug-ins, or to formally parse the document using the Cradle-REQ parser. This parser can scan paragraphs, sentences, phrases or lines and identify, capture, configure and automatically set attributes for the captured items. It creates cross references between the document and the requirements so that when new versions of these external documents are registered, Cradle can find the differences and automatically provide the impact assessment.
Once captured, the requirements must be engineered to remove ambiguity, contradiction, duplication, imprecision and omission, and to ensure that the requirements are atomic, measurable and testable. Cradle’s requirements management tools can perform searches to identify most of these issues. Remaining issues, such as omission, are addressed by a combination of linking into the work products of later project phases, such as analysis, architecture definition and design and identifying elements therein that are not supported by requirements, and by using the Cradle-REQ tools to perform single- or multi-dimensional coverage analysis to locate incomplete areas in the requirements sets.
Requirements can be decomposed, merged, split and refined. Cradle-REQ allows any amount of grouping and sub-grouping of requirements. Requirements can be organised into hierarchies, and into more complex structures. There is no need to define distinct modules as containers for requirements, which means that requirements that exist in more than one grouping do not need to be duplicated.
Requirements would be linked to issues, risks and test objectives or verification objectives. The functional requirements would be linked into functional and/or UML models of system required behaviour. Non-functional requirements would be linked into the architecture model to act as constraints on the architecture definition, and subsequent budget apportionment into the subsystem specifications.
Non-functional requirements can be related into NFRGs (non functional requirement graphs) to show how each requirement either contributes to, assists, prevents, or hinders a hierarchy of goals and sub-goals. Collectively, these goals can correspond to system emergent properties, especially in regard to issues such as performance, availability, maintainability and sustainability.
Cradle-REQ can support any requirements management process, whether in-house or published in books, guides and vendor training courses.
The iterative nature of the requirements engineering process can be supported by status attributes for each component of the requirement. Requirements’ attributes can be colour coded to show the maturity of each of their component attributes, by colouring each attribute individually and automatically.
Feature Benefit:
| Features: |
Benefits: |
| Automated requirements capture from source documents |
Highly efficient loading of stakeholder and system requirements yields high accuracy and productivity |
| Word and Excel plug-ins |
Efficient capture of requirements and other items directly from their source documents and spreadsheets |
| Powerful capture parser with sentence based parsing |
Automated categorisation of item attributes and capture of item attributes from parts of source statements, automated creation of individual items from individual sentences |
| Requirements transfer from other tools |
Load requirements from tools used by customers and suppliers, and return data to them in their preferred format |
| Automated comparison of new versions of source documents, with impact analyses |
Easily identify all changes and assess their impact |
| Automated completeness checks to validate the extent of requirements capture |
Ensure that nothing is missed |
| Multiple requirement variants |
Support multiple types of product within a common product family, allowing requirements to be allocated to zero or more variants |
| Requirements grouping, categorisation, history tracking, and evolution |
Efficient requirements management of the most complex requirements sets in the most complex of requirements management processes |
| Graphical requirements hierarchies |
View and manipulate cross references graphically, from requirements to source documentation, analysis and design models, and to all other item types in the database |
| Identification and correction of ambiguity, contradiction, duplication, and omission |
Comprehensive requirements engineering facilities to correct all structural deficiencies common in requirements source documentation |
| Requirements decomposition and merging |
Split compound statements into atomic requirements and evolve the requirements set into new instances to improve clarity and comprehension
Remove duplicative requirements by combining them, or merge contradictory statements prior to their re-expression |
| Requirements derivation hierarchies |
Historical traceability of the evolution of the requirements set |
| Table presentations and sorting |
Easy manipulation of requirements and other items |
| Facility to differentiate system and user requirements from domain knowledge |
Correctly substantiate and justify all user and system requirements statements |
| Requirements evolution through history records, external user annotations, and CM baselines |
Maintain complete records of how the requirements evolved, by whom, when and why, in a formal configuration management framework of versions, baselines and change control |
| Automatically maintained edit histories |
Log of all changes made to the requirements, or comments to them |
| Automatically maintained generations |
Optionally maintains a revision history of edits to requirements |
| Pending delete status |
Deleted items are held in a pending state, for un-delete or cleanup |
| Requirements cross referenced into system models or other data types |
Allocate requirements to system architectures, functions and design items within graphical models, and create mappings to test and acceptance database, and project risks, safety and other critical issues |
| Completeness and impact analyses of requirements to system cross referencing |
Easily identify the impact on all project activities of any change in external documentation or any independent change to the system or user requirements |
| User defined attributes |
Customise the requirements database to the project needs |
| Arbitrarily complex requirements structure |
Accurately reflect the nature of system and user requirements without the need for external tools or complex cross references |
| Robust, multi-user environment |
Easily accommodate systems with 1,000,000 or more requirements and up to 8,192 concurrent users |
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Capturing Requirements
