Requirements are not the property of Business Analysts alone; in any of the software development methodology that we follow today, requirements are the focal point of the entire software delivery process. However, a diversified set of stakeholders and changes all across the development lifecycle make it difficult to align the project deliverables with the correct requirements.
IBM Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) provides a solution to this problem with visually appealing, Web-based interfaces for requirements definition and management. In addition, RRC capitalizes on the IBM Rational Jazz platform and facilitates collaborative, fast-paced development using any of the methodologies like iterative, waterfall, and agile.
Features & Benefits
- Allows the stakeholders to get the requirements right throughout the software delivery chain.
- Keeps all stakeholders in sync with the latest changes and ensures smooth change propagation through lifecycle silos.
- Enables Web-based review of requirements and collaboration through real-time comments integration.
- Integrates RRC with tools from multiple functional areas and vendors to support lifecycle traceability and impact analysis.
- Allows Project Managers to visualize and analyze requirements from their Project Management tools itself before allocating resources, thereby improving productivity and reducing costs.
- Provides a centralized platform for requirements elicitation, analysis, organization, and management.
- Enables requirements in RRC to flow bi-directionally between RRC and other integrated ALM tools thereby facilitating effective change management.
- Ability to integrate RRC with ALM tools irrespective of their vendors and supported platforms
- Full data flow across tools instead of just federated links
- Enables both Sync and Link integration through Kovair’s RRC Adapter and generic OSLC provider
- Two-way synchronization of RRC requirements with other tools
- Ability to create custom artifacts and custom fields in RRC and replicate their data in other tools
- Ability to trigger workflows in other tools based on events occurring in RRC
- Ability to establish relations between requirements, test cases, and defects from disparate ALM tools
- Thin adapter–mouse click configuration of business rules and an ability to create multi-project templates
- Process enabling the Requirements lifecycle through event-action based synchronization and Kovair’s Task based process capabilities
- Conflict detection and mediation
- Web interface for end-to-end traceability, consolidated reporting, and dashboard
Kovair Support for RRC Integration
RRC allows integration with other ALM tools through OSLC linking. However, linked data based OSLC integration does not effectively address use cases that demand synchronization of artifacts across RRC and best of breed tools from other vendors. Kovair RRC Integration adapter addresses this limitation by leveraging the Omnibus ESB architecture to enable collaboration among the customers, stakeholders, and project team members irrespective of their tools and locations.
The integration of RRC with other ALM tools offered by Kovair is not a point-to-point integration. Instead, it is based on the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architecture that requires only one adapter per tool, thereby making the integration environment readily scalable. It instantly allows RRC to get integrated with all the other tools integrated to Omnibus.
Also, unlike OSLC integration that links objects of Jazz based products, the integration of RRC with other ALM tools using RRC adapter facilitates entity and field mappings and ensures full data flow across tools.
RRC Integration Adapter offers the followings:
Requirements Management
During the course of Requirement Lifecycle, requirements may start as just cryptic notes from client interactions or rough documents from customers. Analysts and other stakeholders do the necessary brainstorming to understand what the final product needs to deliver to attain the business objectives. The brainstorming or analysis often involves text, pictures, process diagrams, use cases, and story boards, which must eventually become part of the workable requirements that drive the design, development and test activities.
RRC provides textual and visual techniques to elicit, elaborate, and validate requirements with stakeholders over the Web.
Once the requirements are planned and detailed in RRC, you can replicate them in other integrated tools, such as Quality Center, JIRA, TFS, and RequisitePro and link with the native artifacts of these tools. For example, you can create Work Items in TFS corresponding to the requirements derived from RRC. Furthermore, you can link these work items to the code files that are being checked into TFS to get traceability from Requirements in RRC to code files in TFS. In addition, you can create and replicate custom artifacts and custom fields to aid your development activities.
Kovair RRC adapter-based integration works bidirectionally and can help synchronize disparate tools from different silos. Synchronization of requirements across tools ensures that they are always up-to-date and are being accessed by the appropriate stakeholders in their own tool environment.
Collaborative Development
Conventional Requirements Management tools enable Analysts in detailing the requirements and managing changes effectively. However, since requirements are not proprietary information that can be accessed by Analysts alone, it is beneficial to have the requirements integrated into the tools used by different stakeholders.
Through RRC adapter, other stakeholders can get information regarding the requirements detailed in RRC. This information can be used in other integrated tools to associate the requirements with code files, tasks, test cases, and defects to ensure that all the development and test activities are oriented toward the actual requirements.
Change Management and Traceability
As the customer and project team keep getting better understanding of the system needs and constraints, the project requirements get changed continuously throughout the SDLC. It is imperative that to ensure successful project delivery, the requirement changes are propagated to the stakeholders effortlessly and in real time.
Kovair Omnibus’s central framework, in collaboration with Kovair RRC adapter, allows creation and management of traceability relationships between requirements in RRC and other tools. Thus, any change in any requirement in RRC is synchronized to the corresponding artifacts in the other integrated tools.
Tools Integration
Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform is capable of integrating tools irrespective of their vendors and platforms. Kovair’s SOA based technology makes it very convenient to integrate any tool on the fly. Just like RRC adapter, Kovair provides adapters for several other ALM tools that can be hooked to the Omnibus platform. Thus, the best features of each tool can be used to manage the artifacts related to the projects.
Comments and Relationships
When tools are integrated through the Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform, comments and relationships between artifacts can also flow across the integrated tools. This feature enables the stakeholders to review requirements from their preferred tools and sync the comments with the requirements in RRC.
Flexible Configuration
Kovair Omnibus integration allows codeless configuration and management of business rules through user-friendly Web interface, independent of the individual tool adapters — no hard-coded logic is involved.
How the RRC Adapter Works
- The RRC Adapter, developed using JAZZ APIs, provides the mechanism to collect events generated in the RRC and perform actions on the RRC requirements. The events collected by the RRC adapter are sent to the Execution Engine of Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform.
- At the other end of the Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform are other best-of-breed ALM tools, such as Microsoft TFS and HP QC, which are connected using their respective adapters/connectors developed by Kovair.
- The Execution Engine is responsible for retrieving the event messages collected by the RRC adapter, processing those event messages according to user-configured integration flows, and sending action messages to the other integrated tools through their respective adapters. The reverse can also be achieved by performing actions inside RRC triggered by events occurring in other tools.