Rational Requirement Composer

Rational Requirements Composer helps teams define and use requirements effectively across the project lifecycle.

The whole team creates and uses requirements, though a business analyst may lead the effort. Better, faster requirements lead to less project rework, faster time to market, and better business outcomes.

  • Engage a wide range of customers and other stakeholders in the requirements process. Use intuitive storyboards, process diagrams, use cases, and other visual and textual techniques to uncover customer needs and define good requirements
  • Gain fast stakeholder consensus through effective team collaboration and deep visibility into team activity
  • Foster agility and predictability with light-weight requirements practices, centralized repository, common dashboards, and team-wide conversations
  • Analyze, organize and manage requirements and their changes efficiently using attributes, collections, tags, filters, views, and out-of-the-box report templates (including UI specification, audit history, traceability report)
  • Align development and test teams with business priorities using collaborative application lifecycle management (CALM) integrations, relating requirements, work items in IBM Rational Team Concert, and tests in IBM Rational Quality Manager
  • Where teams are capturing and organizing requirements in a work item backlog, elaborate these work items with visual and textual notations to accelerate communication with and commitment from the customer or product owner
  • Where teams are managing requirements with Rational RequisitePro or Rational DOORS, provide requirements definition accelerators as described above
  • Rational Requirements Composer 2.0 adds a web client, review and approval workflow, collections and snapshots, shared filters and views, customizable dashboard with viewlets shared with Team Concert and Quality Manager, and much more
  • Operating systems supported: Windows

Features and Benefits

Features and benefits of IBM Rational Quality Manager Standard Edition

Collaborative application lifecycle management (CALM) integrations

Align development and test activities with your business priorities and requirements. Link requirements with work items in Rational Team Concert and tests in Rational Quality Manager. The Jazz platform takes integration to a whole new level with information transparency across integrated tools.

Open and flexible platform optimized for requirements collaboration

Better stakeholder involvement leads to better requirements and better project outcomes. IBM Rational Requirements Composer fosters business and technology team collaboration in an online requirements community involving a wide set of stakeholders including customers, analysts, developers, testers, and operations/production. Make requirements and related business context visible to the extended team — including those who join the team later. Break down the information islands that exist among the various tools and data format used to express requirements information. Establish relationships among related information using hyperlinks, collections, attributes and tags. Have group conversations in threaded comments; see what others are creating, changing and commenting on. Include in this web of requirements information files created by the tools you use today: office documents, recording of conference calls, and informal documentation (for example, snapshots of white boards).

Web-based review and approval workflow

Web-based review and approval workflow enables your teams to achieve consensus and validate requirements faster by shortening the review and approval cycles. The customizable user dashboards and viewlets provide collective information about project membership, recent activity, recent requirements, collaboration, and reviews. Commenting capabilities now include direct comments to multiple users.

Rich text authoring

Consolidate unstructured information (rich text, images, tables and link internal and external documents) with easy document creation. Embed artifacts (diagrams, sketches) to create concise and clear vision and specification documents. Using this editor, users capture the annotated information to support any project, business goal or requirement.

Organize and find requirements

IBM Rational Requirements Composer supports collections, shared filters, tags, attributes, hyperlinks and advanced searches to help you find and organize requirements and related information. These features help improve productivity and increase reuse.

Business Process Diagrams

Many IT projects are undertaken to enhance business process, and developing a good understand of the as-is and to-be processes is an important goal of the requirements definition process. Using a select subset of business process modelling notation and a simple native editor, users create, share and validate current and future state business processes, including roles, rules, tasks, and decision points. Link business process diagram elements, tasks, and decision points to use cases, UI sketches, and requirements. Allow stakeholders to conceptualize how various inputs, outputs, and roles can work together to execute processes that create value for the business. Then relate other requirements artifacts to this business process to create a web of requirements information.

User Interface Sketching

Express user interfaces (UIs) with wire frame mock-ups through a simple UI Sketching editor. Create mock-ups and workflow examples for web-based interactions that link any UI component to rich document descriptions and requirements. Visualize system transactions and interactions as the user would, identify user experience issues prior to costly web-development.

User Interface Storyboards

Storyboards are a common, proven technique in movie-making: a fast, inexpensive way of communicating ideas; finding points of consensus, disagreement, and ambiguity; then making decisions. Requirements definition and solution design are highly iterative and likewise benefits from this kind of visual expression of user scenarios. Both non-technical and technically-minded stakeholders can readily grasp the relevance of the storyboarded scenarios, and this can raise the quality of the requirements elicitation and validation conversations beyond what typically happens during textual document reviews. Quickly assemble UI storyboards in Requirements Composer from sketches using reusable components and templates. Make fast, consistent changes, which are propagated automatically. Link any UI part to other documents and requirements. UI storyboards can be represented in low visual fidelity when communicating general ideas, or in more life-like, higher fidelity, when communicating notions of visual design.

Use Case Models

Create use case diagrams that capture system behavior. Elaborate use cases with rich document descriptions. Link use cases diagrams with use case specifications, user interfaces sketches, storyboards, process flows and requirements.

Dynamic Glossaries

Unify teams and remove ambiguity that leads to errors by using common, integrated glossaries. Support multiple glossaries to capture enterprise and project-level terms. Includes support for: search, synonyms, and related terms. Link to glossary terms from anywhere there is text using built-in content assistance tools.

Artifact Collections and Project Snapshots

Define scope and manage change using collections and snapshots. Establish baselines and compare them to understand what has changed. Rational Requirements Composer allows you to return to specific revisions of artifacts and the links and comments that existed at the time a snapshot was created.

Parallel requirements development

Using collections and snapshots your development team can use one version of an artifact in one project iteration while someone is further elaborating it for the next iteration.

Reports and document generation

Automate tasks for generating and publishing hand-offs, contracts, reports, traditional reviews, use case survey documents and requirements specifications using out-of-the-box reporting based on Rational Publishing Engine technology. Out-of-the-box report templates include UI Specification, Use Case Specification, Traceability Report, Review/Approval Summary, and Audit History. A reporting wizard guides you in creating these reports in common file formats, including Microsoft Word, PDF, HTML, and XSL formatting objects (XSL-FO).

Dashboards

Let the important information find you. Requirements Composer includes user and project dashboards. Web dashboards include customizable viewlets, which can pull information from multiple tools (Requirements Composer, Team Concert, Quality Manager). See the latest comments for you or for the whole team; see new and recent changes in the project artifacts.

Integrates with Rational RequisitePro

Integrates with RequisitePro to enhance requirements analysis and traceability across lifecycle assets in Rational Software Architect, Rational Software Modeler, Rational ClearQuest®, Rational Application Developer, Rational Data Architect, Rational Systems Developer, WebSphere Business Modeler, WebSphere Integration Developer, Rational SoDA®, Rational Unified Process and Rational TestManager ®.

Integrates with DOORS

Use Requirements Composer and DOORS together to optimize team productivity in fast-changing and carefully controlled projects or project phases respectively.