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Manage your requirements with RequisitePro

Martin C. Brown (questions@mcslp.com), Programmer

Martin C. Brown, a Studio B author, 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, a core member of the AnswerSquad.com team and has written a number of 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 platform and numerous environments. MC can be contacted at: questions@mcslp.com, or through the MCslp Web site.

Summary: Software is based on requirements -- the requirements of your clients, team, marketing department and other entities, all of whom send you requests about the features that they would like incorporated into the system. But how do you track all of this information and use these requirements to help manage your project? In this tutorial you'll see how to turn the requirements you receive into a project within RequisitePro, which enables you to track the requirements information and use this to produce project plans and requirements documents.

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Date: 04 Jun 2004
Level: Introductory
PDF: A4 and Letter (865 KB | 41 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

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Before you start

About this tutorial

One part of the software development cycle that is often overlooked is requirements. These requirements take many different forms, including the requests of users and management, the features and functionality of your competitor's products, and the needs and requirements demanded by your development team to achieve the requirements specified.

If you are the project manager or lead developer of software products then you are probably involved in the specification and management of the requirements during the life of the entire project. Managing and collating that information can be time consuming, unless you have a specialized tool like RequisitePro® to help you with the process of requirements specification and management. RequisitePro is a tool that enables you to specify the requirements and features of an application before the application starts to be developed. This saves time, money, and usually a lot of frustration by giving your developers an initial definition of the application prior to the actual coding process.

RequisitePro provides a database for storing and tracking requirements. You can add requirements to the database through a dedicated project management-like interface, or you can populate the database while writing the requirements specification within Microsoft Word. This latter method enables you to continue using your familiar requirement specification documents and templates, and even to generate the requirements from within Word, while gaining all the benefits of a managed database of requirements.

In this tutorial you'll see the basic mechanics of the requirements process and how RequisitePro can aid the specification and tracking process. The various requirements are covered in the following sections:

Plan a software project
Transfer your requirements into RequisitePro
Organize project information
Create requirements within RequisitePro
Project documents
Reports and views
Manage requirements during a project

Prerequisites

To complete the steps in this tutorial, you will need a copy of RequisitePro. Download a trial version.

You will also need a full working copy of Microsoft® Word 2000, XP (Word 2002) or Word 2003 to get the best benefits from the system.

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