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AnalystPro from Goda Software
is a cheap basic RM tool providing forms and templates to support good practice and workflow across a development project.
Caliber-RM from Starbase Corporation (now acquired by Borland)
is a well-known requirements management tool created by Starbase Corporation. It is intended for large and complex systems, and provides a database of requirements with traceability. The company views requirements as part of the software quality management process, which it considers also includes testing and defect tracking. Caliber is Internet-based, and it handles document references, user responsibility, traceability, status and priority among other features.
C.A.R.E. from Sophist Group
is a Lotus Notes-based tool which provides a database-like view of requirements. The website is in German but the tool's GUI is in English. Using the hypertext-like Lotus Notes is an interesting approach to organizing requirements with obvious practical advantages, and the Sophist Group is noted for its Object-Oriented thinking. The tool provides a wide range of features and produces both textual and graphical outputs.
Catalyze from SteelTrace
Catalyze takes a structured view of requirements, breaking them into Functional (in the form of a Use Case-like storyboard structure of main flow, alternative flows etc.) and non-functional requirements (qualities and constraints). These map seamlessly to functional test cases, UML activity diagrams, requirements based milestones in project plans etc. Ease of use is emphasized.
Cradle from 3SL
Cradle is a multi-user, multi-project, distributed and web-enabled requirements management and systems engineering environment. It is intended for all sizes of requirements and systems development projects. Cradle can link to corporate PDM/EDM systems. It offers configuration management, edit histories and version control. It automates document production and can manage the generated documents. Through its web interface, it can integrate disparate stakeholder groups by creating customisable read-write portals to all project data.
Clear Requirements Workbench (CRW) from LiveSpecs Software
helps specify, verify, and manage detailed requirements. CRW supports four detailed specification techniques (glossaries, action contracts, test procedures, and precise use cases) for the clear description of definitions, behavior, and usage. CRW is under development, with completion expected in Q2 of '04.
Doors from Telelogic
Doors is a tool primarily for large organisations which need to control complex sets of user and system requirements with full traceability. It provides good visualisation of such documents as hierarchies, and its extension language enables a wide range of supporting tools to be built, and many are provided as menu commands and examples. Further options include DoorsNet which allows controlled interaction over the Internet, and the Change Proposal System which automates the requirement review cycle. There are live interfaces to many CASE tools, and the promise of tight integration with Telelogic's market-leading Tau toolkit for specification, design, and testing based on UML and the SDT approach to real-time systems development centred on telecommunications. Its use is therefore moving towards integrated project support.
IRqA from TCP Sistemas e Ingeniería
IRqA (Integral Requisite Analyzer) is a "requisite analysis tool". IRqA allows users to contrast the requirements with a problem description. It represents business concepts with an object-oriented model, and organizes the requirements with a facets model. The tool expects development to iterate between the models, and to be user-centred.
On Your Mark Pro from Omni Vista
This tool comes from Alan Davis' company -- he is now a professor but was at Requisite until it was taken over by Rational. The tool is middling in size but is well set up to provide support for decision-making with a good predefined set of attributes and the option to add more. It is to some extent a project manager-friendly approach with support for COCOMO and Function Point estimation.
Process Framework (OPF) from Firesmith Consulting
This remarkable toolkit contains a repository of reusable process components for building project-specific processes for software-intensive systems - complete, hook, line and sinker. There are numerous reusable process components including work products (from requirements, diagrams, models, documents to components), work units (activities, tasks, and techniques), producers (roles, teams, organizations), enterprises (projects, programs, enterprises), and stages (development cycles, phases, milestones). Requirements are supported in detail including document content and format standards, templates, inspection checklists, and guidelines.
RDT from IgaTech Systems
RDT is a relatively simple tool from an Australian company. It is based on Microsoft Office, but with numerous custom forms (pop-up windows) for entering settings, attributes, etc, and for displaying results. Thought has been given to getting requirements in from ordinary Word documents, and to producing documents as reports by filtering, selecting attributes, and formatting. This seems to make it intermediate between 'light' products like RequireIT and Requisite Pro, and 'full' products like DOORS and RDD. 'Capture' is interpreted simply as 'import and extraction'. The tool wisely encourages users to record design rationale.
Reconcile from Compuware
This is one of a suite of tools focused on quality assurance and change management.
Reqtify from TNI-Valiosys
This is one of a suite of tools designed to assist the development of mission- and safety-critical software (in C, C++, Ada) for aerospace, defence, and industry.
Reqtify is a low-cost traceability & impact analysis tool. It is said to take just 1/2 a day to learn. It interfaces to Word and other word processing tools, the other TNI-Valiosys modelling tools, Simulink, etc. It has been applied on Airbus A380 computer projects (alongside RTM) with thousands of requirements and links. Interestingly, the tool is document-centric: requirements are tagged by the user in the source documents; the tool searches for these tags each time a source document is saved, and makes a snapshot of the requirements so discovered.
RequireIT from Telelogic
DOORSrequireIT is Doors' little sister. It is effectively a rival to Requisite Pro, as it is a Microsoft Word tool in which users edit and mark up a Word document with hidden fields that function as custom attributes (owner, status, date, etc) and as traceability links between requirements. RequireIt is simple to use and does not involve the complexity of reliance on a database as well as on Word, so it is arguably a leaner and easier-to-use tool than its rivals, and may be more reliable. It is implemented entirely separately from Doors (it uses Word macros not compiled code) and is intended for use on small projects.
Requisite Pro from Rational Software Corp.
Requisite Pro aims especially at managing change in requirements, with traceability for software and test specifications. It is closely linked to Microsoft Word, and Rational is a Microsoft Development Partner. The tool permits the use of Oracle on Unix or Windows as the back-end database, and also supports SQL server on Windows. Rational is now (2003) merging with IBM which might mean many things, such as a greater focus on research and consultancy, perhaps.
Rhapsody from I-Logix
Rhapsody is an Object-Oriented Analysis and Design tool for embedded software. The emphasis is rather on design, with analysis using UML to describe objects for subsequent detailed design and code generation.
ScenarioPlus
ScenarioPlus for Use Cases is a set of free add-on tools for use with Doors. It installs as a menu on the Doors menubar, and provides for editing and analysing a set of UML-style use cases. Metrics and checklists are provided. There is a strong emphasis on requirements elicitation with easily-understood graphics, generated automatically. The toolset is closely integrated with Doors allowing for complete flexibility in filtering, traceability and reporting.
The site also offers a suite of Microsoft Office templates for scenario-based requirements engineering; tools for editing a range of software engineering diagrams, and tools for functions such as filtering and constructing Doors templates.
Slate from EDS
Slate consists of "Industrial Strength Groupware for managing requirements, architecting systems, and accelerating product development". Tools cover design and testing as well as requirements. The examples on the website include radar and aircraft carrier, so there is a perceptible military-industrial orientation. The tool provides for conventional box-and-arrow diagrams, but also allows document and object hierarchies,and arbitrary traceability linking. An interesting feature is a budget which provides a recursively added hierarchical spreadsheet for each attribute ('technical allocatable' in Slate jargon) which is to be budgeted. Slate is apparently genuinely object-oriented and as such should suit large industrial projects that want to use OO analysis and design. Some systems engineers see Slate as a tool that mainly supports the life-cycle after the requirements phases. It provides limited support for requirements capture.
SpeeDEV from SpeeDEV
This product takes the approach that requirements in a distributed project need to be developed on the Web. It is claimed to be suitable for hardware as well as software, and covers requirements gathering, "scrubbing", approving, prioritizing, assigning to version releases, task management, testing, bug tracking and other functions. This sounds as if the toolkit will suit some kinds of project very well, but might prove restrictive if the way the tasks are supported isn't what your project wants. The Web is clearly the way more tools will go, so expect hot competition in this area.
Team-Trace from WA Systems
is a requirements management tool released in 2002.
Vital-Link from Compliance Automation
Ivy Hooks' company produces a database-centred requirements management tool front-ended by the word-processing engine Framemaker. It seems to be well liked on large projects which still use Framemaker in a world increasingly dominated by Microsoft.
The Volere Template from The Atlantic Systems Guild
The Volere Template is a comprehensive list of all the components that the Robertsons recommend should go into a requirements specification. It is closely associated with the Volere template and method described in their book, but contains many useful suggestions that could enhance any requirements method. The template can be used with any general RE tool or simply with word-processed documents.
XTie-RT from Teledyne Brown Engineering (TBE)
TBE released XTie-RT commercially in July 1996. The tool was initially developed for in-house use to assist with proposal development, regulation compliance on environmental programs and large complex systems for the US Army and NASA. It encourages users to document the reasons for decisions.
Users are equally divided between Government contractors and Commercial industry, and between hardware and software. The tool is claimed to be simple to learn, robust and full featured. TBE consider Doors their primary competitor.
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