Requirements

Requirements are supported for the Enterprise Advantage license and display in the Requirement tab of the upper pane in the clients. With the requirement component, you can create requirements within the application and show the dependencies among them. For example, if one requirement must be fulfilled before a second requirement can be fulfilled, the first can be made a child of the second. If your company enforces process rules, the requirements you establish can also be used to drive the development process. Administrators and other authorized users can publish requirements from Caliber to StarTeam using Publisher to StarTeam, which is delivered with Caliber.

Requirement Characteristics

The requirements in the upper pane have the following characteristics:

  • They are attached to the folder selected from the folder hierarchy.
  • They match the filter selected from the Filter list.
  • They match the depth specified by All Descendants.
    Note: You can click the All descendants button on the Requirements view toolbar.
Note: Icons display to the left of a requirement in the upper pane to indicate its status and whether you have read the latest revision.

How Requirements Can Help

By using a requirements-driven development processes, companies can prevent consuming, costly misunderstandings and shorten time to market. To accomplish this, you can use the StarTeam built-in requirement component as your basic tool, or publish complex requirements to StarTeam from Caliber. Using requirements enables business analysts, managers, developers, QA staff, and others to:

  • Organize business, user, and functional requirements in a hierarchical format.
  • Indicate the dependencies among requirements.
  • See all layers of requirements at all times.
  • Prioritize requirements by importance.
  • Identify the impact of changes to requirements.
  • Use requirements to estimate work.
  • Identify the person creating the requirement.
  • Notify those who will be responsible for fulfilling the requirements.
  • Track the requirement life-cycle from submitted to completed or rejected.
  • Provide requirements with a context by linking them to files, change requests, and topics.