Understanding the Significance of Requirements Management

Requirements Management plays a significant role in ultimate success of the project in a distributed software and systems development project. And for an efficient and optimal management of Requirements, a fully functional Requirements Management tool is not just a necessity, it is highly critical. Collaboration and reusability are considered to be the two main aspects of requirements management, which can help considerably in a distributed environment.

Managing Requirements with a collaborative approach

 Collaboration and integration tools among diverse groups or roles working across various geographic locations have become essential for existing software development life cycle practices. It is the basis for working together to share information and to finish tasks. Among the different phases of software development lifecycle, the Requirement Management phase demands better collaboration, due to the fact that a number of distributed stakeholders need to be involved in creating, reviewing and approving Requirements. For distributed teams, an optimized requirements tool should provide for Collaborative Knowledge Management Infrastructure. It should preferably be a distinct web-based application that can envelop all the features required for all asynchronous collaborations. With such a tool, users are allowed to gain access to Requirements Management solutions even from remote locations and facilitate collaboration across geographically dispersed teams. Web based software ensures better TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) which can be quite low as compared to a similar client-server software with a light web interface that offers a relatively small subset of functionality. With a good proactive and reactive impact analysis, the 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.

Requirements Reusability

 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. Requirements reusability allows users to use well defined, reviewed and approved Requirements from one scenario to another. The situations may differ in terms of different projects, different customers, different products or even different releases of the same product. Cloning of one or more requirements and Reusing Requirements across various Organizational units like Projects for Views and Traceability are some of the tools used to manage reusability.

An ideal requirements management tool promotes Collaboration and Reusability for a Requirements Management group consisting of stakeholders from diverse disciplines.

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Rendering Promising Performances with the IT Help Desk Software

The purpose of the IT help desk software is to facilitate customers to submit requests and report incidents. It helps the customers to communicate with the IT administrators for finding resolutions. The software should provide automated processes that help in identifying the issues and finding the resolutions accurately without any delays. It should help the customers to submit tickets without any complications and forward the tickets with the updated status to the IT administrators for resolving the issues effectively without any possibilities of recurrence.

The IT help desk software should have the capability to support multiple processes and facilitate the execution of several workflows within a single interface. A flexible IT help desk process facilitates the designers to make changes promptly without any issues. It facilitates the execution of multiple tasks that are all related to one particular ticket. It should provide the facility of calculating and estimating the service level agreements easily and automatically. It should provide a dashboard for viewing the performance of the helpdesk in real-time. It should provide solutions that can easily integrate with the other processes and help in building an efficient and productive management process.

The development of ideal IT help desk software is dependent on the application lifecycle management platform that is responsible for the entire development cycle with enhanced collaboration and traceability capabilities. The ALM process has to capture the requirements of your business accurately and track the progress of the entire process. It should provide real-time updates so that critical business decisions can be implemented and changes can be adopted without any hassles.

The application lifecycle management process should deploy responsible test management practices such as maintaining the inventory of test items, planning on how, why, where and when to perform tests, running the tests, analyzing the reporting the test results, measuring and tracking the quality of the end product. The application lifecycle management process also includes tools for issues management and risk management. It ensures that all issues are captured efficiently, tracked, prioritized and effectively resolved. Similarly it monitors and assesses the risks to understand their impacts.

The application lifecycle management process plans the deployment of the software with the help of a competent release management process. It designs and deploys processes for distribution and installation of changes to IT systems. It provides a secured operations environment free from any disturbances or interferences. It provides proficient project management capabilities with integrated, automated and customized solutions for the development of deserving IT help desk software.

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Multi-Tool Integration- An Imperative for your ALM Ecosystem

Managing software development projects a number of functionally, geographically and technologically distributed is a difficult task. It is always a cumbersome process to control and manage information creation and flow when multiple groups at different locations using different tools are involved without a process.

Integration without a process and process without automation is always bound to result in a failure.

Unconnected tools often result in manually consolidating different change requests in different tools. This tends to be tedious, error prone and is very rarely done in a reliable manner. With a lack of process across tools, there is almost always no integration and synchronization with each other. And this also results in all the information being locked in an individual tool, specially used by one particular group. To avoid all these problems, the best solution is to define, implement, automate and enforce processes using state of the art process automation tools.

Advantages of a Multi-Tool Integration

An Integration bus technology allows a multi-tool integration in bus architecture. It also offers a significant savings in integration effort. With an integration tool, there is always a two way synchronization between two tools, and this keeps all the information up-to-date in both the tools. Synchronization of data is just the starting point of any meaningful integration. A bigger value is gained by synchronization of the relations among these data, and this way there is not just a synchronization of data but there is also a synchronization of all the relations among the data.  

Process Enabling Integrated Tools

Process enabling a myriad of tools that do not have a built-in process engine can be difficult. This may have been an impossible feat earlier but with integration bus technology there is fruitful and interesting integrations within a single framework. An integration bus technology enables the ability to map between objects in the integration bus and the external tools, including attributes, methods and policies. The technology also has to have the ability to create processes for different workflows and also allow it to be friendly work with tools running anywhere and on any technology platform.

Invest in the right solution helps in creating a bridge between various tools used by both Development and IT groups. It helps customers in standalone function specific tools such as Service Requirements Management or Issues Management with the built in process capabilities as well as with its Omnibus Integration bus to integrate various third party tools both in ALM and IT Service Management Solution.

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Enterprise application integration Development

Enterprise application integration has always been a challenge, and with the surfacing of new technologies for hosting infrastructure, platform and software across locations integration has become even more demanding and complex. Business needs are constantly changing and the traditional application integration methods do not meet arising challenges, thereby bringing out threats to the agility of an organization. When done correctly, with the right choice of technology, application integration can deliver immeasurable strategic and technical value.

Successful Implementation
The primary step towards a successful implementation is the defining of goals. It is imperative for stakeholders to understand the business drivers for integrating applications and get information under management. It is also necessary for the stakeholders to know about the accessible applications and services under management, the core business processes and their dependencies, their integration scenarios like Application-to-Application, Business-to-Business, and Cloud based applications. The next important step is to define high level objectives, the requirements management that tackle organization's actual near-term, midterm, and long-term integration needs and road map for the features and functions to be deployed.

Selecting the right integration Technology
The next crucial step once you have set your goals, is selecting the right integration technology. It is of large importance to choose integration tools that provides a one-stop solution for all the required integration needs and offers a quick and effortless deployment alternative. It should require minimal IT support and also offers enhanced flexibility while supporting functional reusability. The chosen technology must have self-regulating change management system and also deliver interoperability. It must also meet the requirements for enterprise class security and supports multiple versions for the same tool or application.

It is possible to create a successful and customized tools ecosystem with standardized SOA based tools specific omnibus adapters. These tools can be from any vendor or any legacy data or any custom homegrown application development and IT tools. Choosing the right integration technology in software development life cycle has advantages that are not typically found in the vendor specific point tools or even a suite of tools.

It has become extremely important to leverage more ROI out of existing infrastructure and applications and organizations are continually challenged with finding out ways to do so. An effective application strategy is imperative to overcoming this challenge. Opt the right integration technology and adhere to the best practices to ascertain an agile, reliable and scalable platform that is prepared to extend the life of existing applications and be ready to meet the future application development demands.

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Requirement Management Software: Optimizing for global platform

The globalized business world is a fiercely competitive one too.  For organizations to stay ahead in the competition requires efficient selection and management of their products and services to cater to the ever-changing demands of the tech savvy customers. Irrespective of the organizations being a large business conglomerate or a Small and medium sized business enterprise requirement is extremely valuable information. In high tech companies, the requirements management is a crucial role and the Product management and Business Analysis teams are responsible for the same.

Requirements can be defined as the “desired characteristics of a product (or service) which is being developed. These are usually in the form of a formal statement of a function to be performed, or an attribute to be possessed by the product or service as per customer demands”. Requirements Management is usually carried out as the function by the product Management, Product Marketing, Engineering, Project Management and related teams, to gather, track, store, prioritize and implement requirements.  The requirements are either enhancement requests, feature requests, product feedback that are collected from external stakeholders, internal stakeholders and through in-house or outsourced market research.

The technological innovations have led to the development of requirement management systems, which has, empowered the project management teams to work more efficiently. Requirements management is a continuous process in the lifecycle of a project and involves documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing the requirements and managing change with the basic aim of meeting the expectation of the internal and external stakeholders.

Beginning with analysis and elicitation of objectives and constraints of the organization, requirement management includes planning, integration with the organization and bringing about changes. The traceability thus established supports change management and the impacts of change in terms of compliance, completeness, coverage and consistency. Requirements can be from different sources, the requirement traceability is thus related to documenting the life or a requirement and the changes made in the system to meet the same. The requirement traceability matrix should be able to trace back to the origin of each requirement even after the change has been implanted.

The requirement management software from leading technology service provider is a completely web based requirement gathering and management application. Optimized for a global platform, this provides a rich and configurable set of tools to collaborate project goals, deliverables and requirements. Besides, with a number of built-in features such as single to bi-directional traceability relations and impact analysis, requirement reuse, ranking, base lining, change management, process automation, multiple format reporting and this software facilitates integration with other tools. This enables better management and control of offshore projects, facilitates effective working of telecommuters and paves way for better collaboration with internal functional groups and service partners.

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