Understanding the Significance of Requirements Collaboration within the ALM

Requirement management, in a distributed software and systems development project, plays a significant role in the success of any project. A fully functional requirements management tool can be highly important for the efficient and optimal requirements management. A simple way to begin Requirements Management as a practice is using documents and spreadsheets, but this quickly becomes a liability instead of a reliable tool. The two main elements of Requirements Management that can greatly assist in a distributed project, are Collaboration and reusability. With a collaborative Requirements Management that is equipped with a high degree of reusability can significantly decrease the development time and risks.

Understanding the role of Collaboration within requirements management

For today’s software development practices, Collaboration” amongst dissimilar groups / roles working from different geographic locations has almost become inevitable. As collaboration is the basis for working together to share information and to accomplish customary tasks, among all phases of software development lifecycle, it is the Requirement Management phase that greatly demands collaboration. There are globally distributed stakeholders who are needed to be concerned in creating, reviewing and approving of all Requirements. With a Collaborative Knowledge Management Infrastructure, enterprises are bound to get better results for their distributed teams. An ALM solution that is backed by a single web-based application can efficiently cover all the features essential for all asynchronous collaboration.

A good bet for any enterprise would be an application lifecycle management solution that  is a  purely web based and customizable. Such a solution can suitably offer various opportunities to work collaboratively to manage requirements. This way, users can access the Requirement Management solution from remote locations and facilitate optimized collaboration across geographically distributed teams, with an improved and broader spectrum for projects. Ideally, in Requirement Management, the landmark can be set by producing baselines on regular period which permits the archiving of the history of Requirements so that easy referral and  is possible even on a later date. In the event of the management wanting to view the contents of the set of Requirements, for instance, they can just check on the baseline drawn.

An efficient Requirements Management tool can help a distributed project in achieving collaborative Requirements Management with a remarkable degree of reusability. Reports can also be easily generated as of any random point in time to illustrate the position of an ongoing project with a flexible baseline.

Learn more about: ALM Software , ALM Tools & ITSM processes

Respond Effectively To Change With Agile Methodology

The Agile methodology or agile software development is a series of software methodologies that is based on incremental and iterative development, where solutions and requirements evolve through collaboration between the cross-functional and self-f-organizing groups. It also encourages adaptive planning, delivery and evolutionary development, and promotes elastic and rapid response to any change that takes place. It can be best defined as a conceptual network that encourages foreseen communications throughout the development cycle.

Eminent companies dealing and providing Agile methodology, using the SCRUM methodology to deploy a diverse range of tools important to implement the Agile technology within a distributed development platform. What defines an expert service provider of agile solution from the rest available in the market is the configurability. The best solutions in agile methodology available supports the following entities, artifacts or objects as listed below:-

• Projects – contains more than one Releases
• Releases – contains more than one Sprints
• Sprints – With numerous durations from 1 to 6 weeks
• Product Backlogs – Categorized as Features, Epic, User stories
• Daily Scrum Meeting – In a distributed development regular SCRUM meeting occurs remotely even sometime asynchronously
• Test Cases – Implementing conventional Test Management approaches incorporated with Agile to reinforce testing of certain Product Backlog by Traceability Relations
• Issues/ Changes – a comprehensive issues management solution incorporated with Agile including custom

Advanced Agile methodologies have an in-built task management system, with the help of which certain task can be set up automatically or manually, based on policy and processes engines set by the concerned service provider. The key Metadata for a task are:-

• Status (Open, Completed, work stated)
• Owners
• Activity

Other complimentary standard metadata includes different planning fields such as actual and estimated work, start as well as finish dates. Customers can add custom fields to tasks while operating.

Furthermore, these tasks are connected to different Artifacts such as-

• Issues
• Defects  & Backlog

However, there are more than one tasks linked to an Artifact item that can be entered into the system in various ways. Some of the notable ways include importing from Microsoft Word and Excel, importing from earlier projects, submissions from incorporated web pages from corporate portals or through integration with numerous IDE’s or any other tool, such as Eclipse, Visual Studio, Requisite Pro and many others. These apart, renowned service providers of agile methodologies also offer their expertise and innovative solutions for application lifecycle management.

Learn more about : Requirements Management , ALM  , ALM Solutions &  enterprise service bus 

Requirement-management-The key to Smoother Project Lifecycle

Major overheads faced by the industries in the present day scenario are from defects and nearly 50% of these defects results from incomplete understanding or incorrect requirement statements. Requirement being the key functionary in every application lifecycle management can be defined as a set of demands, necessities, needs or parameters that must be satisfied within a certain time constraints. In business parlance, this is a standard of benefit, cost, timeliness and value of a product or service as perceived by a customer.

Requirements management thus is a continuous process throughout a project life cycle. This begins with analyzing the objectives and constraints, documenting the need and tracing, planning and prioritizing the requirements and controlling change. Every stage in the development process of a project lifecycle has some key requirements, management activities and methods. With a good communicative link, changes in the requirements can be controlled. Further requirements traceability is a must as this is concerned with tracing and documenting the origin of each requirement and the changes in it over a period of time. Flexibility is required in any project or product design, but a wide deviation from the original requirement only creates complications in the entire process. Hence, a requirements management document becomes a critical tool that helps the team make decisions about design changes.

With technological innovations playing a major role in every aspect of the industrial sector, their foray into managing requirements has led to the development of both desktop and Web-based tools. A web-based Requirements Management solution provides a rich and configurable, global platform for summarizing the requirements, collaborating their development and tracing implementation back to specifications. The requirements tool has the options of being installed at the customer’s data center or taken in as on-demand platform. With administrative and configuration processes supported over the web, this solution facilitates effective management and control of offshore projects, better collaboration between internal functional groups and service partners.  These also come with added services like data security and round the clock availability of data.

The requirements management software takes in multiple types of relations including custom ones. The requirement traceability tool creates logical links between requirements, single and bi-directional traceability relations. The requirement traceability Matrix and traceability relation network allows both proactive and reactive impact analysis with all requirement management tools accessible through a highly user-friendly interface.

Learn more about: - ALM solution & ITSM processes

e-Framework of compliance for Enterprises ? Compliance Management Software

Every organization, whether big or small, needs to conformto certain stated requirements. This compliance is achieved through variousmanagement processes such as regulations, strategies, contracts and policies. Compliancemanagement is not a new term for the industries, but in today’s industrialscenario, Governance,Risk management and Compliance are grouped under one umbrella as GRC and itis a new way of adopting an integrated approach to corporate governance,enterprise risk management and corporate compliance. 


The compliance management software solution haspaved the way for an integrated approach to the various compliance issues facedby any organisation. Management of compliance procedures traditionally, weredone at department levels. With the industries going global and user groupsspread worldwide, these compliance initiatives have become complicated andintertwined with regulatory and organisational requirements. This intertwinednetwork brings down the efficiency of the organisation and poses a great riskto its existence.


The advantage of using compliance management software is thatit continuously monitors the process across enterprises. The compliancedashboards highlight issues and triggers off alerts that need immediateattention and correction from the respective organization authorities. With anautomated flow of information assessments and testing methods, the integrateddocument management system controls change and keeps business process in sync,complete with audit and change reports. This software also provides themanagers track the status of issues till these are solved as per the complianceprocedures.  Further, it provides forworkflow, document management, inventory controls, compliance scanner, anddetailed access controls through a secure web based interface.


The impact of the use of virtual desktops and cloudcomputing has effected every organization. This has made the business world asmaller place and has increased the complexity of security and management ofresources. With resources spread globally and in a virtual space, the need fora cloud based automated IT security and compliance management solution makesenormous sense that consolidates GRC compliancemanagement solution and information security that is easily adaptablewith a built-in support to various compliance management frameworks and todifferent industry segments. The compliance management software with aneffective system of IT governance, and advanced risk mitigation system, willdefinitely cover threats from all areas whether external, internal, deliberatedor accidental. Additionally, it would also be flexible enough to seamlesslyaccommodate new regulations and policies that would be developed in future.


Also read on: PCI Compliance, Healthcare compliance here.

Compliance Solutions for Small Medical Practitioners

Even as Small Medical Practices (SMP) are comprehending the importance of compliance, there are many such practitioners who have taken it upon themselves to understand the requirements of compliance in its true essence; so much so that some of them have gone ahead and hired compliance consultants. But on the other side there are other small medical practitioners who are yet to understand why such a hue and cry is being made about compliance. These practitioners are yet to understand the gravity of the penalty involved if healthcare compliance measures are not adhered to. They continue to live under the false impression that they will be able to manage all security concerns with the best firewall and antivirus solutions, but clearly such measures cannot be deemed to be sufficient to ensure complete security for all patient related health information.

Some SMP’s, although they understand that there must be complete compliance to both HIPAA and HITECH regulations, cost- concerns worry them as compliance burdens their budgets. However such SMP’s need not worry as there are quite a few effective and efficient healthcare regulatory compliance solution vendors out there who can ably assist such small practitioners in dealing with all these healthcare compliance requirements in a smart and cost-effective manner. With the right kind of solution backing up such SMP’s, they can be rest assured of fulfilling all compliance requirements with the best technology and controls that can indeed strengthen the security of all information assets of the SMP. By investing smartly in an optimized healthcare compliance solution, all SMPs’ can avail of the best in automated technology and solutions.  Additionally, SMPs’ should also check if the solution they opt for is easy to apply and also offers easy adaptability to different systems and furthermore it would do the SMP a whole of good if the compliance solution they opt for can be aligned to the aims and objectives of the practitioner. Scalability is also an important factor that can permit SMP’s to monitor security controls with greater efficacy.  Being alert and responding to threats and vulnerabilities in real-time is yet another important feature that an automated and optimized healthcare compliance solution can also offer.

There needs to be a slight change in the rigid thinking of some of the older SMP’s who believe that compliance requirements can be trifled with. Such SMP’s need to understand that the administration has taken stringent measures when it comes to the protection of confidential patient health care information and that all healthcare providers, however big or small, need to provide the best security to such information under all circumstances, lest they want to face the consequences, which may amount to hefty penalties or even serving a jail sentence.

Read More on: governance risk and compliance, IT compliance and security