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Improved application development: Part 1, Collating requirements for an application

Martin Brown (questions@mcslp.com), Freelance writer and consultant, MCslp

Martin C. Brown is a former IT Director with experience in cross-platform integration. A keen developer, he has produced dynamic sites for blue-chip customers, including HP and Oracle, and is the Technical Director of Foodware.net. Now a freelance writer and consultant, MC (as he is better known) works closely with Microsoft as an SME, is the LAMP Technologies Editor for LinuxWorld magazine, is a core member of the AnswerSquad.com team, and has written books on topics as diverse as Microsoft Certification, iMacs, and open source programming. Despite his best attempts, he remains a regular and voracious programmer on many platforms and numerous environments. MC can be contacted through this Web site at http://www.mcslp.com.

Summary: Developing applications using the IBM Rational Unified Process is a lot easier if you have the tools to help you throughout the process. The Rational family of software offers a range of tools that on their own provide excellent support for each phase of the development process. But you can also use the different tools together to build an entire application. By sharing the information, you can track components in the application from their original requirement specification through testing and release. This first part of a five-part series shows how to use Rational RequisitePro to manage and organize the requirements specification for a new project. Then, after you've developed your unified list of requirements, the tutorial shows how to use Rational Software Modeler to model your application based on those requirements.

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Date: 21 Jun 2005
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (543 KB | 39 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

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Before you start

About this tutorial

Many people and many steps are involved in developing software, and not all of them relate to actually writing code. Defining the functionality and requirements of the project, controlling the code base, and monitoring progress are all processes that need to occur, regardless of whether you're involved in developing the code.

The IBM® Rational® family of products can help the entire application development process, from the inception of an idea through final release and bug tracking. The Rational family includes tools for defining requirements IBM Rational RequisitePro®), visually modeling (IBM Rational Software Modeler) and coding (IBM Rational Application Developer) an application, tracking defects (IBM Rational ClearQuest®), and managing changes to the application (IBM Rational ClearCase®). All these tools can be used with or without the support of IBM Rational Unified Process® (RUP).

To make the development process even easier, you can combine the functionality of individual Rational applications into a single, cohesive environment for developing, managing, and tracking applications. Each product has methods for communicating with the others to obtain, update, and integrate the necessary information.

In this five-part tutorial series, you'll learn about the integration of these components and how to use them together to manage the application development process from its inception from a client to the point at which bugs and faults need to be traced and tracked through the system after the initial release. For the examples employed throughout this five-part series, the well-known Auction system -- a sample application used in many IBM applications -- is used.

Part 1 of this series shows how to use Rational RequisitePro to manage and organize the requirements specification for a new project. Then, after you've developed your unified list of requirements, the tutorial shows how to use Rational Software Modeler to model your application based on those requirements.

Key parts of this tutorial include:

Introducing the development process
Developing the requirements spec using Rational RequisitePro
Documenting the project requirements through Rational RequisitePro and MicrosoftÂ® Word
Accessing requirements data through Rational Software Modeler
Translating requirements into an application model
Tracing model elements back to the requirements

Prerequisites

To run the examples and sample code in this tutorial, you'll need to download trial copies of Rational RequisitePro, Rational Software Modeler, and Rational Application Developer as well as the RUP package, which includes complete documentation on the techniques, methods, and systems behind RUP. You'll also need Microsoft Word (at least Word 97, although Word 2000 or later is preferred).

To complete the steps in this tutorial, you need:

Rational RequisitePro Version 2003.06.x
Rational Application Developer Version 6.0
Rational Software Modeler Version 6.0
RUP

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