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Benefits

Web 2.0 technology facilitates the requirements engineering and management process and leverages the work of requirements teams by integrating with a full-lifecycle management platform. Polarion Requirements abolishes the information barrier between requirements authoring medium, collaboration tool, and implementation management that has been the industry norm... until now. The integrated, web-based yet document-like approach delivers these features and benefits:

Revolutionary Requirements Content Management

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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.)