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Featured Tool
MKS Integrity—Requirements Management
Vendor: MKS Inc.
Address: 410 Albert St.
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3V3
Canada
Phone: 800.613.7535
Fax: 519.884.8861
Tool URL: mks.com/products/requirements
Description: The only enterprise requirements management solution
offered within a coherent ALM platform, MKS Integrity
helps you to drive shorter cycle times, superior quality
and complete traceability. Reuse and requirements
change management capabilities are coupled with
meaningful (and traceable) relationships to downstream code
and testing assets, to ensure communication of change,
conformance to requirements and compliance with applicable
governance or regulations
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Advertisement
White Paper: Real Reuse for Requirements
The ability to reuse requirements provides organizations the unique
ability to share a requirement across projects without duplicating
artifacts in a repository. This is a critical capability that
accelerates time to market. Learn how your organization can
effectively reuse requirements to reduce complexity and dramatically
cut development costs.
Download Real Reuse for Requirements now! |
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Sticky ToolLook Interview
Pragmatic Requirements Engineering with Steve Partridge
Steve Partridge is a customer requirements manager with MKS.
In this interview, he discusses the concept of pragmatic
requirements engineering.
StickyToolLook: Some might not be familiar with the term
"pragmatic requirements engineering." Does it go beyond
requirements definition?
Steve Partridge: Pragmatic requirements engineering is about
balancing the appropriate amount of requirements definition
with the appropriate amount of requirements management. This
reduces the tendency to over-engineer either your requirements
solution or the requirements themselves; the result should be
fewer overhead activities and more activities that drive towards
producing results. The trick is choosing a solution that can
adapt to the specific needs of individual projects or product
lines, rather than a solution that is overkill for one and yet
lacks capabilities for another. Pragmatic requirements engineering
demands a requirements management solution that can meet multiple
specific needs across your organization.
STL: How does requirements engineering fit into most organizations now?
SP: Every organization struggles with requirements engineering.
Too often, requirements engineering is isolated by both process
and technology from the rest of the organization and (even worse)
from the rest of the development cycle. This is sometimes the result
of over-engineering a requirements solution to the point where it
is no longer adaptable. When a requirements management solution
cannot fit coherently into the lifecycles of different projects
or products, it tends to operate in a "silo" rather than being closely
connected to the rest of the lifecycle. For example, a QA team
writing test cases will often interact with the developers to
ensure that they will be testing the software correctly—but will
fail to connect with the analysts in the requirements silo, even
though the requirements are driving the design of the software
in the first place.
Organizations can really benefit by taking a step back and addressing
their requirements engineering needs pragmatically. If there doesn't
seem to be a lot of churn or complexity, a sophisticated notification,
reuse, and impact-analysis solution will only introduce too much overhead.
If there are many code lines, common components, and lots of churn, it
will require complex reuse strategies, intricate trace structures between
requirements, specs, and test cases, plus all the collaboration aspects
like notifications. Unless your organization wants to license and manage
multiple solutions, it's crucial to choose a solution that can scale
while meeting unique needs.
STL: Agile puts a spotlight on adaptability. How do you make sure that
you can invest in a tool and keep going back to it without locking
the business analyst (or whole organization) into a particular approach
when other circumstances change?
SP: Today's enterprises must invest in solutions that are adaptable
enough to meet the changing demands of customers and the market
while retaining the visibility and auditability needed for governance.
Different application lifecycles will be best suited by different
approaches. For some, a traditional waterfall approach is needed,
while others are served well by agile methods. Still others will
thrive with a mix of methodologies. Some projects or products are
cheap, simple, and done in a week; others are complex, require hundreds
of resources, and have multi-million dollar budgets. The best solution
is one that can be easily tailored to unique needs, spanning whatever
degree of agile and other methodologies that are appropriate. A key prerequisite
here is a solution that offers deep competence that spans all phases
of the application lifecycle (from inception to delivery). Otherwise,
the risks, costs, and challenges of integrating disparate tools are
apt to overwhelm the value that can be provided by the technology.
If an enterprise is serious about increasing success rates for its
software development, it must invest in a solution that can adapt
to agile and other specific needs across the organization both now
and in the future.
Keep the Conversation Going
Have a question or comment? Send an email to jmcallister@sqe.com and keep the conversation going.
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ADVERTISEMENT
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Media Spotlight
STAREAST Conference Video
Marine Corps Principles of Leadership
Featuring Rick Craig
Even with the best tools and processes in the world, if your
staff is not focused and productive, your testing efforts will
be weak and ineffective and your finished product will reflect
this. Retired Marine colonel and long-time test consultant
Rick Craig describes how using the Marine Corps principles of
leadership will help you become a better leader and, as a result,
a better test manager or tester.
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What's Happening at StickyMinds.com
Featured Web Seminar
How to Streamline Enterprise Deployments using Test Data
Sponsored by Infosys
Linda Hayes and Krishna Murthy discuss effective
TDM strategies that help extract greater value from expensive
data and make validated test data available in an organized,
secure, consistent, and controlled manner. Our speakers also
explain how QA organizations can utilize a comprehensive TDM
strategy to provide consistent and standardized approaches that
ensure high quality and reliability of large enterprise applications
and systems. As a result, QA teams—some of which are highlighted
in this Web seminar—deliver faster, reliable, and more efficient
testing. Join us Tuesday, February 9 at 2 p.m. ET.
Register Now
From the Download Center
Building Blocks of an Effective Test Data Management Strategy
Speed of business and growing competition requires IT
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that improves application quality, reduces time to market, and
minimizes the cost of development and testing. Availability of
the right data during testing is crucial for ensuring high quality
of testing. Using a comprehensivetest data management strategy, QA organizations
are able to provide a consistent and standardized approach to ensuring
high quality and reliability of large enterprise applications and systems.
Learn More!
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Outside the Tool Box
Ommwriter
There was a time when it was a badge of honor to be able to
multitask well, and it's still something we have a hard time
shaking. Answer the phone, check your email, instant message
a coworker, watch an online video, peruse your news reader,
doctor that photo of your cat you took this morning and upload
it to icanhascheezburger.com. But many experts these days point
out that we actually get more done when we focus on one thing
at a time.
That's the logic behind Ommwriter, a text editor with a Zen
twist that's currently in beta release. It operates only in
full-screen mode and gives you a choice of calming background
images, ambient music, and typing sound effects.
If you need the bells and whistles of Microsoft Word, Ommwriter
probably won't cut it--the only traditional features include three
font options, three font sizes, and a word counter. But, if you
need to get away from distractions for a while, pull out some
headphones and give it a try.
Read more about the Ommwriter Today!
SEND US YOUR OUTSIDE THE TOOLBOX "TOOL"
Do you know of any fun or unusual tools, toys, or other items that
might be slightly outside the software development toolbox? Tell us
about them by sending an email to Joey McAllister at jmcallister@sqe.com
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Advertisement
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For more information, visit www.sqe.com/stareast |
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StickyToolLook is an extension of StickyMinds.com and Better Software
magazine—and a reminder that your "online resource for
building better software"
is just a click away at www.StickyMinds.com |
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