Good Requirements Tracking SW (preferrably open source)?
I was looking for a solution for my technical department analysts and PM’s to track software requirements.
I did not look in this area since maybe 2003 and was expecting some breathtaking advances in their usability and, of course, everything now is expected to be free and Web-based.
Surprisingly my research shown not much improvement since 2003:
In addition to good old IBM Rational RequisitePro now Borland’s CaliberRM solution is quite popular, however I did not even take time to look at it, expecting some heavy weight, enterprise grade, robust (more words to come which should not be said to my mom).
The new RTM apps seemingly from the new world of Agile development, which I decided worth looking at, were:
- iRise manager
- SpeeDev
- OSRMT (Open Source Requirements Management Tool)
I also spent some time reiewing tools, which can be adopted for requirements management, namely:
On my way I came across a notable thing: a set of templates for SRS and other project documents (and a very good one!): ReadySET and its commercial colleague ReadySET Pro. I will recommend those any time, since at least their requirements templates are great.
Ah, and I did not look at Basecamp, because I hate it for its simplicity 
So here are my findings:
From all packages specialized on Requirements Management I would still favor RequisitePro. OSRMT would be a simple alternative, however it requires too much of pre-tuning to set up good templates and is not very stable. iRise looks great on Flash demos, it would be unbeatable, if it worked as shown, however the reality is it took me 30 minutes to create a project and I could not even add a requirement to it. SpeeDev remains untested, Web site information was enough to decide that I better switch to some issue tracking system, which will be just a little bit poorer in functions, though easier to understand. An additional benefit would be combined bug and requirements tracking.
Among issue trackers Trac takes “A” grade for its combination of Wiki, SCM and issue tracking. Jira has best usability. Mantis has just enough functions to work with.
The final decision for today was:
Given the fact we are already working with Mantis for bug tracking, I’ll probably set up proper forms and reports for guys to work on Requirements with Mantis (it has SOAP interface
If anybody out there has a tool to recommend, I would appreciate any advises.
The requirements are:
- (must have) Able to work on multiple projects with multiple components
- (must have) Able to track hierarchical requirement structure
- (must have) Web based
- (must have) Allow customizable workflow
- (must have) Assign requirements to versions, track execution
- (must have) Generate SRS documents
- (nice to have) Word import
- (nice to have) Changelog generation combining bugs fixed and enhancements in a particular version.
Hey Egor,
Ran into your blog… I see you are using the infamous ‘Mantis’ a lot. Curious, did I happen to turn you onto it at our project with Morpheus? (it was around before, but at the time was early in it’s stages and it’s progressed a lot).
Hope all is well
- Turan
Hi Turan, nice to see you here
Frankly we used Mantis even before Morpheus project, since about 2002. It was the first issue tracker we used (switching from some hand made stuff). We chose it for its ease of installation and configuration and since then we never felt being wrong, because it can also be extended easily and it is actively progressing on its own.
We also use RT for Service Desk issues, it has a little bit better functionality in work with unstructured requests, like customer emails.
Curious to know what your ultimate decision was. I’m looking for a requirements tracking tool, too. My main must-haves are:
* integration with JIRA
* filterable, searchable, and sortable artifacts list
* MySQL back end
* customizable fields
* data export to Excel
* priority setting
* role-based permissions
* Web client interface
Have you seen Polarion?
DK.
Well, no ultimate decision yet. We are contionuing evaluation of RequisitePro on one projectt and working with Trac on another one.
In your case you didn’t specify whether or not you have resources to customize a solution or you want it out of the box. In case you are able to do some customizations I’d recommend to look at OSRMT. It does most of what you need, however you’ll need to deal with Excel and Jira on your own.
Check out this software. I use it for project management, planning and bug tracking. It aloows task tagging and submitting bugs via email.
Any news on this? We’re currently looking for requirements tracking software and are using mantis for bug tracking.
We are using Mantis and Excel as of right now. Given simplicity of both it is really great solution for the amount of reqs we have (up to few hundreds per project).
Have you considered using Accept. It has good functionality for tracing Functional Requirements to Business Requirements and also allows Agile concepts like Stack Ranking Product Backlog and Iterations to be part of the process
Have you tried TestLink? v1.7.3 and up has Requirement Specification support.
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MikaT
Have you tried TestLink? v1.7.3 and up has Requirement Specification support.
Our QA department is evaluating TestLink now. I’ll use the moment to evaluate its Req. tracking capabilities.
To chris:
I reviewed briefly Accept. Haven’t enough time to test it, however from first view it looks promising for high level business goals and requirements management. It is a great solution for high volume products, when feature planning largely interferes with business planning. My original goal was more focused on operational tracking of features and their implementation. What I was looking at was a tool closer to developers, than to executives. For higher level planning I used to Excel, and I stand it is far more flexible. However Accept can be useful for companies where optimization of product management resources is much needed (including commong workflows, out of the box product planning process automation etc.).
Following Testlink discussion: This looks promising, however unmature. Good things to note:
- Well integrated into testing environment
- Easy to use
It lacks:
- Categorization of reqs (keywords at least would help but they are not assignable to requirements)
- Custom fields in reqs (again they are available in test specs, so I suppose they will appear in requirements soon)
- Text import of requirements document
Overall it seems to be designed to support external requirements management system rather than implement one internally.