SylvanoMTL said:

I have tried to share the spreadsheets that contains the requirements, but this is always ignored.

It strikes me that this is your real problem.  People can ignore your requirements however you present them.

When it comes down to it, DOORS can be considered a glorified spreadsheet.  It's linking and filtering abilities are probably better, but you're still turning your requirements into a big table.

Totally agree with Simon. For small projects (and I'm involved in very serious safety critical projects) I find Word or Excel absolutely fine. The clever bit is more the way you approach the requirements.

Key is ensuring that the requirements (however they are managed) cover the following:

• A unique requirement number.
• A precise definition of the requirement, the test being whether it will be clear what the evidence will need to be to show that the requirement has been met.
• The rationale for the requirement, what will happen if the requirement is not met. This becomes important both to support chasing requirements and for those cases where requirements don't get met and the risk needs to be justified of leaving them (permanently or temporarily) as outstanding / cancelled.
• The owner of the requirement. Really important, this is the person who has overall responsibility and accountability for the requirements being / not being managed. And if the requirement doesn't get managed, the person who takes responsibility for justifying that. Back to the post, the person who has the problem of chasing these requirements to get closed. This needs to be at the appropriate level of seniority, which may be your problem.
• The status of the requirement, e.g. in preparation (wording being agreed), in progress (engineering being carried out to meet the requirement), closed (evidence provided that requirement has been met), transferred (decided that this requirement is the responsibility of another project), or cancelled (deemed as no longer required).
• For very formal processes, evidence that that the requirement has ben met e.g. a reference to test evidence

So you can see how a simple Excel sheet can manage this, with a simple filter on the "status" column giving you the key project control information of which are your outstanding requirements. Which you can then bring up again and again at each project meeting...

DOORS is useful where you have a huge number of requirements across a project with many subprojects, maybe running over several years, and you want many different views of this, and links to sources and evidence etc. But as Simon says, it doesn't make anyone comply with the requirements any more than a simple Excel sheet does. What I tend to use is a Word document to list the requirements in a formal Requirements Specification as it's easy for the engineering team to read, but Excel to track the requirements for management - I've set up the Excel template I use a lot (which includes a load of other stuff as well) to include a "Word friendly" sheet so it's very easy to cut and paste from this to update the Word version when I need to.

Hope that helps,

Thanks,

Andy 

I had a play with LibreOffice Calc last night.  Although it's very poorly documented, you can create hyperlinks between cells in one sheet to cells in another.  So if you created one sheet per document, you could add links between, say, a test plan and the requirements document that it needs to meet.

I had a play with LibreOffice Calc last night.  Although it's very poorly documented, you can create hyperlinks between cells in one sheet to cells in another.  So if you created one sheet per document, you could add links between, say, a test plan and the requirements document that it needs to meet.

Hi Simon Barker  you could try looking at projectmanagement.com. 

www.projectmanagement.com/searchresult.cfm