Collaborative Requirements Management Tool from Kovair

Requirements Management and Product Management

Kovair’s Requirements Management solution provides a rich and configurable, global platform for capturing a set of requirements, collaborating on their development and tracing implementation back to specs. Its Requirements Management tool ensures that all developers are working from the same playbook, no matter where they are located, and that there are no costly last minute surprises - whether the project was developed in the office next door, or by an offshore partner 10,000 miles and 10 time zones away. The result is a top-quality application that matches what the user asked for and complies with all internal and external requirements. Scroll down to see the detail of the industry leading Requirements Management solution offered by Kovair.

Product Features : Requirements Management Tools

Kovair Requirements Management is an anywhere-anytime requirements gathering, management and analysis application. Project goals and deliverables are shared by diverse team members (customers, analysts, software architects and designers) to collaborate on managing requirements around town or around the globe. Requirements Management’s rich implementation of requirements gathering, parsing, management, traceability, base lining and intelligent reporting in a process-driven, methodology, enables project teams to effectively manage and map requirements. This enables the creation of a feature rich product. It includes:

Kovair Requirements Management was designed from the ground up as a web-based application optimized for project work that is distributed between buildings on your campus, or at sites around the world. All functionality, including administrative and configuration processes, are supported over the web. Kovair enables

Telecommuters work more effectively
Better management and control of offshore projects
Better collaboration with different internal functional groups
Better collaboration with service partners

In Kovair, you can use Requirements Gathering techniques in any of the following ways, applicable to agile requirements management as well.

Using Rich Text Editor in Kovair, you can open a Microsoft Word document or copy-paste a portion of formatted text to the Rich Text Editor
Submitting from your Corporate Website or Portal
Sending them by Email
Importing from Microsoft Word Document
Importing from Microsoft Excel spreadsheet
Importing form a CSV file with configurable format
Using any third party Requirements Management and other tools to define Requirements; and in real-time synchronizing them with Kovair through Kovair's Omnibus Integration Bus

Kovair supports Requirements Management of many flavors - standard as well as proprietary methodologies or processes. All the capabilities necessary to perform Requirements Management tools effectively and effortlessly are built-in in Kovair that are accessible through a highly user-friendly interface. These include:

Many-to-many single and bi-directional Traceability Relations with proactive and reactive Impact Analysis
Requirements Reuse
Requirements Change Management
Requirements Base lining
Requirements Ranking
Release Roadmap and Decision Support
Requirements Process Automation
Integrations with other tools
Requirements and Development Methodology
Requirements and Test Management Tools
Requirements Reporting in multiple formats

Kovair Requirements Management tool has the most comprehensive Traceability Relation features. Kovair allows multiple types of relations including custom ones between Requirements. Create logical links (depending, affecting, bi-directional) between requirements and view in a number of visualizing tools Kovair offers. These include folder hierarchy report of Requirement Traceability, Traceability Matrix and Traceability Relation Network diagram. Kovair allows both proactive and reactive impact analysis. Impact of changes is forwarded to stakeholders automatically to ensure synchronization and address corrective actions so that problems are addressed early to minimize cost of changes at the end of the lifecycle.

In any organization well written and implemented Requirements have a great value. By reusing these Requirements assets, projects can cut down overall development time and enhance quality. Kovair has several features to support Requirements reuse by 'Mass Conditional Cloning', 'Shared Requirements' and 'Versioning with Branching and Merging'.

Requirement changes are the reality of any project. They are also the source of unbridled cost and time overruns. A well defined and consistent Change Management process is the only way the Requirement changes can be reviewed, approved, implemented and tested within acceptable costs and timelines. Kovair's process engine the Omniprocess allows a design, implementation and automation of a Change Management process closely related to the automated Requirements Management process.

With thousands of Requirements gathered from various sources any Product Management or Analyst group faces the daunting task of determining the relative importance of these Requirements for a set of organizational goals. Kovair helps in gathering ratings for each Requirement from multiple users against a set of business goals. This rating process can be embedded within a larger Requirements Management process and automated using Kovair's Omniprocess engine. After the ratings are done, Kovair can automatically determine the weighted score for each Requirement and that can be used for Requirements for proper product management and development decisions.

Through the capabilities of its built-inOmniprocess Workflow engine, Kovair facilitates complete automation of the Requirements Management workflow- the way it happens in your organization- by facilitating the creation of a Step-based ormore complex Task-based process. Most of the Requirements Management tools in the market today do not come with built in process workflow engine like Kovair does. This capability helps simplify task management across time zones by replacing manual task assignment with automatic handoff - such as during the review of Requirements before including them in a product roadmap or when the developer in Bangalore is finished coding, the designated tester in Dublin is automatically notified and assigned the next step of ensuring test case creation and testing. This process configurability and automation supports any methodology or process (RUP, Agile Methodology, Scrum, CMMI Process). If your development is distributed globally this process automation eliminates many emails, phone calls and coordination of tasks meetings across different time zones and enhances productivity considerably. The analogy is similar to a fully automated "lights out" manufacturing facility.

Requirements and Development Methodology promise. Even if you wish to call your Requirements "Users Stories"(XP) or "Backlogs" (SCRUM) you can configure Kovair to use those exact names. But, like most of the organizations if you follow a proprietary methodology that is loosely related to some well known one, Kovair helps you implement it without any limitations.

Kovair Global Lifecycle produces reports and Requirements documents of various kinds. They include:

MRD - marketing Requirements Document, a fully formatted Word document
SRS - System Requirements Specifications, a fully formatted Word document
Product Roadmap Document, a fully formatted Word document
Test Compliance Report, a fully formatted Word document
Trend Charts

Burn Down Charts
Requirements Stability Chart

Graphical Charts
- Distribution of Requirements by Type, Criticality, Source...or any other custom field

These reports can be generated by a number of different reporting engines Kovair supports:

HTML, enabling direct printing from the Requirements list page
Export any lists to Excel for additional formatting and manipulation
Built-in Crystal Report offers easy way to do custom formatting, or create your own reports from scratch
Word Reporting enables fully customizable formatting with multi-level data elements from Kovair Global Lifecycle

Testability and Verifiability are some of the core properties of a good Requirement. But just Testability is not enough for a successful implementation of Requirements. One needs to actually create Test Cases for each Testable Requirements and test them again and again until the release of the product. A Test Management tool is invaluable to create, execute and manage the Test cases and run results. But it is imperative to have Traceability relations between the Test cases managed by a Test Management software and the Requirements so that as Requirements change, the related Test cases can be kept in step with those changes. Integrated Requirements Management and Test Management in Kovair's Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution work together to give the users the power of QA driven Requirements Management. If a third party Test Management Systems (e.g. Quality Center from HP, Test Manager from IBM Rational) are in current use at a customer, they may be integrated with Kovair's Requirements Management with many-to-many bi-directional Traceability features. For that user will need Kovair's Enterprise Solutions.

Product Benefits

With Kovair's multiple capabilities of capturing inputs from customers by emails, website based inputs or importing of customer documents and putting them through a well defined Requirements Review Process with the Kovair Omniprocess workflow by analysts and their management, a company can set up an excellent system of capturing customer inputs both for new product ideas as well as improvements of existing products. This provides any company; large or small, a very critical tool to not miss any inputs from a customer that are always a key factor in enhancing customer satisfaction as well as bringing competitive edge to its product lines and improving its business and market share. The payback of this system cannot be underestimated!

Kovair's Requirements Ranking capabilities and What if Analysis capabilities for Release Management, provide any Product, Marketing and Engineering Management groups a very easy and methodical way of analyzing the content of a given release and make sound decisions that are logic and payback based rather than "gut based" from certain individuals. This simplifies further buy-in of the outcome and puts all groups in complete harmony moving forward in developing and managing a good product release.

Formalizing and automating requirements management and enabling reuse of requirements speeds project completion by anywhere from 25 to 40% depending on the prevailing practices in an organization versus ad hoc or manual processes for managing requirements through Word documents or Spread sheets. So companies cannot and should not think that this type of tool is only essential in a large organization. A good process and methodology allows small companies grow faster and manage their growth much better with proper tools that create good quality and enhanced productivity.

Having one version of the truth captured and shared globally by all developers means fewer design errors make it through the implementation cycle. The result is significantly less testing time and almost no reworking of the application after system testing. Total project labor cost is saved by 10-20%.

Collaborative Requirements Management allows for a shared single repository with globally distributed teams having web-based access to requirements. This checks errors as teams work with the same specifications, and anyone with the appropriate permission can make changes- automatic notifications are sent to other team members based on the Change Management process set up in the Kovair Requirements Management system.

Regulations are really just requirements generated externally. With 100% backwards and forwards traceability, regulatory compliance is automatically ensured if managed through Kovair Global Lifecycle/RM, mitigating a big risk to any business.

Requirements Management is very critical but just one of the phases of full Development Lifecycle. If you are ready to manage rest of the Lifecycle with the same set of highly usable tools you may want to upgrade to Kovair's Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution. The ALM solution includes a set of required Applications for SDLC including Requirements Management, all seamlessly integrated with one another using a single user interface. The applications included in Kovair's Application Lifecycle Management are:

Requirements Management being the start of a development lifecycle process needs to work with various other tools down the line, to make a development project successful. These tools include Test Management, Issues Management, IDE, Configuration Management, Risk Management, Release Management. Though, some of these tools are built-in within Kovair Global Lifecycle, Kovair's Omnibus - Integration Bus Technology allows organizations to integrate external best-of-breed tools from third party vendors with Kovair as well as with other tools in the ecosystem. Whether using the built-in tools, or external tools, the ALM tool ecosystem created by Kovair Omnibus, works seamlessly with Requirements Management from Kovair. To use Kovair's Omnibus Integrations Technology, you need Kovair’s enterprise service bus architecture solution

For more information, visit Kovair's Application Life cycle Management (ALM) Solution page.