Revolutionary Requirements Content Management

Manage multiple types of requirements-related content — wiki, office documents, and data artifacts — in one place, on a comprehensive platform that also enables other parts of your organization to leverage requirements and efficiently manage the rest of the process. Your organization also gains unparalleled knowledge reuse capabilities 2 ways:

• Through full traceability: find something that originated in a requirement and reuse that requirement elsewhere.
• Through repository searches: the unified repository-based platform architecture enables search and retrieval across all kinds of content anywhere in the system. It's like having Google^® for your requirements and other development artifacts.

Benefit from the best of both worlds: text and data. Modules in projects can contain both wiki-based free-form text information and granular requirements as data artifacts which can be managed throughout the full application lifecycle. Speed the transition from text to requirement artifact by extracting any text from wiki content into a granular requirement artifact which can be linked to others with hierarchical and other relationships for structure and traceability.

Project Templates: embedded know-how accelerates start-up

Polarion Requirements comes with a prefabricated project template that's ideal for typical requirements projects, and can be customized or cloned and modified to suit your own process. Just choose this template when creating a new project and you're up and running fast, with optimized workflow that supports and automates typical requirements process (including approval), and ready-made, reusable Modules that include a wiki outline page and requirement artifacts in a document-like structure – you simply fill in your own information. Embedded knowledge lets you focus less on the system and more on developing requirements.

Be sure to check the POP Extensions Portal for other project templates and tools.

Leverage current assets in Word and Excel documents

Research shows that over 80% of requirements are still developed using Microsoft Office^® documents (Word or Excel). But even those who use this approach admit it has many disadvantages. With requirements maintained solely in documents, managing change, achieving traceability, and facilitating the implementation, testing, and maintenance phases is extremely difficult. The result is usually sub-optimal, resulting in lower efficiency and higher costs. That's why we developed Polarion LiveDocs™ Technology.

You have the option to author requirements in Word or Excel using special LiveDoc templates that come with Polarion Requirements. When you check in a LiveDoc document to the Polarion Requirements repository, the system automatically detects the individual requirements (and in Word, the hierarchical structure based on heading levels), and subsequently manages them in the same way as requirement artifacts created and stored in the system. You get the best of both worlds: author requirements in office applications, manage them throughout the lifecycle in Polarion taking advantage of efficiency-boosting management features like traceability, suspect links, workflow driven approval process, and more. Changes to requirement artifacts in the system are automatically synchronized in the LiveDoc document, and vice versa.

Full History

The Polarion platform maintains a full and complete history of all the changes to every artifact in the system, whether text or data artifact. No change is ever lost... a huge benefit in organizations that must meet strict corporate standards and/or regulatory requirements for traceability and transparency. You can always understand who changed what and when, and with the links to and from artifacts, very possibly why. You can compare the differences between one revision and another to see exactly what changed between the 2 versions. If necessary, you could even roll back changes to an earlier version of any artifact and move forward from there. (In case you want to know... it's all done with Subversion - the open source change management system that industry analysts have cited as today's market leader.)

Web Based Environment

Easy to use web application with unified toolset supporting all stakeholders. Create testing projects to track test cases, easily linking them to requirements. Create bug reports or change requests for developers, collaborate with requirements engineers on acceptance criteria, etc.

Process Integration

No other tool today has Polarion Requirements' unique capability to define a common process across team/role boundaries to embrace all stakeholders. Use requirement-driven testing, Agile testing, or whatever process works for your organization.

Test case to requirements/tasks linking

Testers can always know what verifies what

Workflow driven test execution

Control the test case lifecycle and test execution with Polarion Workflow.

"Suspect" Links

Make testers alert for changes in issues verified by their tests

Reports

Out-of-box reports deliver a wealth of information about unit test coverage and other vital stats, project by project, or aggregated across any group of projects, or the entire enterprise. Reports are customizable to show what's most important for your stakeholders.

Total Traceability and Editable Traceability Matrix

Traceability is inherent in Polarion Requirements. Achieve it day-by-day by linking requirements, tasks, etc. as people do their jobs, or centrally using Polarion's editable Traceability Matrix. Or use a combination of both these approaches to ensure that traceability is accurately maintained over time. Use the Matrix view with its powerful query engine to create bi-directional traceability views that enable you to easily see what is linked to what... or what is not linked. Easily create traceability reports by exporting matrix data to Microsoft Office Word or Excel documents. Reports can be as detailed as necessary to meet the strictest forensic requirements of corporate governance or regulatory compliance.

Impact Analysis – know before you go

When you use the built-in artifact linking features you create the foundation for robust impact analysis. Everything is maintained automatically and transparently in a repository. You can easily find out how far proposed changes will ripple through linked requirements and gauge the cost before the first byte of data is ever changed.

When other Polarion solutions are used in conjunction with the platform by other teams, impact analysis propagates through linked tasks and change requests, (which are in turn linked to source code), and also through linked QA test cases. The total impact and its potential cost, all the way from top level requirement, to sub-requirements, to the implementation tasks and code, to the testing, is clear. Your organization can make better decisions and avoid surprise costs that so often result from "guesstimates" about the impact of changes in complex systems.

Manage change with "Suspect" Links

"Suspect" links can be used to manage change throughout the project and the organization. By flagging a link between artifact A and artifact B as suspect, the owner of artifact A indicates that it has changed, but artifact B has not yet changed. The owner of artifact B can see that it's necessary to check what changed in artifact A and potentially change artifact B, clearing the suspect flag when finished.

Using the Traceability Matrix, project managers and stakeholders can easily see which artifacts are linked with suspect links, and thereby gauge the level of potential changes still to be implemented.

See where you were, know where you are with Baselining

Baselines are essentially a snapshot of the current state of a project. You can create a Baseline any time that makes sense – at project milestones and releases, for example. You can compare baselines to reveal the levels of change and progress that occurred in the time between baselines. Over time, this can help you understand the realities of time needed to implement things and improve your organizations planning and cost estimation.

Web-based Collaborative Requirements

Remote stakeholders like external contractors and customers, and your internal team regardless of location — all can collaboratively develop requirements online as easily as editing a document on the desktop... with nothing more than their web browser. Structure each requirement with paragraphs and sub-paragraphs, include tables and images, everything "as usual". The Polarion platform reflects everyone's edits in real time, and automatically maintains them in a requirements structure (called a Module) that also preserves sorting.

The web-based graphical Requirements designer lets you design and maintain hierarchical structures of linked requirements in Modules. View requirements as a flat table or hierarchy (tree). Easily add new requirements on any level. Links are visible at all times, and you can easily create links to other artifacts in the project such as tasks.

Leverage existing knowledge through Reuse

You don't need to start requirements from scratch every time. Polarion Requirements comes with a library of typical requirements and specification Modules. Reuse these in your projects, and create new library modules based on the default versions. Just fill in the details in the wiki documents and requirement artifacts and your project is up and running. You're not limited to library content... you can reuse the content of any existing module in your project by creating a duplicate which you then modify as needed. You can optionally link duplicate requirement artifacts to the original versions for traceability all the back to the origin.

Automate process with Customizable Requirements Workflow

The underlying platform's workflow engine can be customized to support any process, including requirements engineering processes. Most if not all necessary customization is already done for you in project templates. You can further customize individual projects if necessary.

By embedding the process knowledge into your management tool, people don't need to keep track of the process, just their part in it. For example, when a requirement has been defined and needs to be approved, nobody has to sit down and email all approvers (remembering who they are). The author need only set a field value to "Send to approval" and all the pre-configured stakeholders are notified. The email they receive has a hyperlink directly to the requirement in the portal. Approval or send-back simply requires setting a different field value on the requirement. Comments can be added which are immediately visible to all stakeholders. On approval, the requirement automatically transitions to the next process step. The people concerned with that step can be automatically assigned responsibility, and of course are automatically notified with an email containing a link to the artifact, in which they can see how it is linked to other artifacts.