Requirements

Requirements describe in details what needs to be solved or achieved to meet the objectives of your application under development. The Requirements module enables you to define, manage, and track requirements at all stages of the application lifecycle management.

In this topic:

Overview

Clearly and correctly defining requirements at the front end of a project provides the following advantages:

• Provides guidelines of what the priorities are to stakeholders

• Sets clear expectations among stakeholders

• Cuts waste and eliminates unnecessary expenditure

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Create and manage requirements

The following steps summarizes how to create and manage requirements in ALM.

Prerequisite:

Determine the requirements scope by gathering information such as functional and technical specifications, marketing and business requirements documents, and stakeholders goals.

Some questions you may want to ask:

• What is the main purpose and direction of the application?

• What are the critical constraints of the application?

• What are the major features of the application?

• What is the relative importance of each element in the application functionality?

• What are the critical or high-risk functions of the application?

• What are your business or testing priorities?

• Do your customers/end-users agree with your priorities?

• What are your overall quality goals?

To create and manage requirements:

1. Create requirements.

   Define a hierarchical framework for your requirements scope by creating a requirements tree.

   Define different groups of requirements in the requirements tree. For each requirement group, you create a list of detailed requirements in the requirements tree. Each requirement in the tree can include any relevant attachments and rich text documents.

   You then assign the requirement a priority level which can be taken into consideration when creating the test plan.

   For details, see Create requirements.

2. Import business process models.

   If you work with business process models, you can create a framework of requirements by importing models created with standard modeling tools. The Business Models module enables you to analyze the quality of your business process models and business flows. For task details, see Business process models.

3. Trace requirements

   You can add traceability between the requirements. When analyzing the impact of a change proposed in a specific requirement, traceability shows the other requirements that the change might affect. For task details, see Trace requirements.

   To determine the completeness of the relationships between your requirements, you can generate a traceability matrix. For task details, see Traceability matrix.

4. Calculate risk

   Use risk-based quality management to calculate at which level to test each requirement, based on the nature of the requirement and the resources you have available. For task details, see Risk-based quality management.

5. Create coverage

   Create coverage between your requirements and tests to ensure that all requirements are implemented in the project. For task details, see Create requirement coverage.

   You can also create coverage by converting requirements to tests in the test plan tree. Coverage is automatically created between the requirements and their corresponding tests. For details, see Create requirements.

6. Link to defects

   You can link a requirement to specific defects. This is useful, for example, when coverage is created between requirements and tests. Linking defects can help you ensure compliance with your requirements and testing needs. If a requirement changes, you can immediately identify which tests and defects are affected, and who is responsible.

   For user interface details, see Linked Defects/Entities Page.

7. Assign to releases

   Assign requirements to releases or cycles defined in the releases tree in the Releases module.

   Assign to release	Right-click a requirement and select Assign to Release.
   Assign to cycle	Right-click a requirement and select Assign to Cycle.

8. Analyze requirements

   Review your requirements to ensure that they meet the defined requirements scope. After a requirement is approved, you change the status of a requirement from Not Reviewed to Reviewed.

   To help review the requirements, you can generate reports and graphs. For task details, see Analysis.

   Tip: For samples of how to create graphs for Business Process Testing framework requirement metrics, see this KB article.

9. Establish baseline

   Create a baseline to sign off on or compare significant milestones in your application lifecycle. For task details, see How to Use Libraries and Baselines in ALM.

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See also:

• Test Plan