Understanding the Significance of Requirements Collaboration
Requirements Management plays a significant role in ultimate success of the project. A completely functional Requirements Management tool is essential for an efficient and optimal management of requirements. In a distributed project, Collaboration and Reusability are the two facets of Requirements Management which can be of considerable assistance. A group using documents for Requirements Management will be compelled to upgrade to a tool based Requirements Management.
In the recent software development practices, Collaboration has become a necessity among various groups working from different geographical locations. Collaboration is the basis for working together to share information and to accomplish common tasks, and of all phases of software development life cycle, it is the Requirement Management phase that exceedingly demands collaboration. This is especially due to the fact that various globally distributed stakeholders need to be involved in creating, reviewing and approving Requirements.
It is therefore necessary to have an application that provides a collaborative knowledge management infrastructure for distributed teams. It needs to be a web-based customizable solution, offers multiple avenues to work collaboratively to manage requirement. It also needs to provide
- Anywhere and anytime access
A user needs to have identity authentication so that the application can be accessed over the Internet from any geographic location. Maintenance and Upgrades to the software are seamless to the end-user and are of light over-head to the IT departments.
- Email notifications to any email addresses.
Notifications can be generated manually on an ad-hoc basis or can be automated. An email enabled mobile phone can be used for interacting with these email notifications thereby allowing users to collaborate with the rest of the team when they are physically apart.
- Multi-threaded Discussions
As the fundamental activity of a team is make decisions on the opinions of its team members, multi-threaded discussions offer an opportunity to communicate such comments in a more ordered way, reducing the need to have costly meetings. These discussion-threads thereby permit one to capture an entire account of the decision making process.
- Integration with Visual Studio Eclipse IDEs
The industry’s principal Integrated Development Environments (IDE) is the Visual Studio Integration Team System and Eclipse. Developers need a service integration bus to integrate and share information with Business Analysts, Architects, Project Managers and Testers, etc. Instead of starting another tool external to the IDE, the developers using these IDEs choose to collaborate within their
preferred development environment.
- Collaboration with Process Automation
The process designer of an application needs to be capable of supporting workflow/process with sequential activities as well as concurrent activities. This establishes collaboration between a set of users working on Requirements, and another set of users working on related Design Elements.
- Customized Workplace
A successful Requirements Management team includes stakeholders of various disciplines which help in getting inputs from various perspectives early in the project lifecycle and increases the prospect of a project’s success. By presenting the same information to the diverse users, the user is either overloaded with too much information or crippled with a lack of information. Requirements Management needs to be customizable and multiple visual interface to promote collaboration at a number of levels.
Reusing requirements
Requirements reusability permits users to use well defined, reviewed and approved Requirements from different situations. The situations could differ in terms of diverse projects, different customers, different products or even different releases of the same product.
An adequate Requirements Management tool can help a distributed project in achieving collaborative Requirements Management with extraordinary degree of reusability which can significantly diminish the development time and risks.
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