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Requirment specification tool for small scale projets (free and open source)

SylvanoMTL

Good afternoon, 

I am trying to formalise my work as part of a new role in a new company. The role was vacant for a long time and there is not much structure around me. I am trying my best to manage projects and avoid scope creeps by drafting requirements based on the discussions I have with my internal customers. Discussions are very often fuzzy and it is not rare that after a month, something comes up on the table, because the internal customer only formulated his wish orally in a corridor and thought I accounted on his comments. My background is very generalist, and  I am looking for a low cost, easy to use solution, that can be understood by a wide range of staff. I guess that if money and time were not an issue I would onboard using IBM rational DOORS, but price is too prohibitive.

I have tried to share the spreadsheets that contains the requirements, but this is always ignored. Also the use of the spreadsheet is not convenient and quite segregated from my other working tools.

I am doing mostly hardware design, but also some software.

I am therefore looking for a software solution that would:

1) help to capture the requirement specifications

2) allow to share the requirements with the customer

3) Have a freeze of the requirement, agreed with the customer.

4) Have a validation plan

5) Have some compatibility with other project management tools (e.g. MS Project)

6) Ideally open source and maintained

7) Ideally Free, or small fee license

Do you have any suggestions?

  • in reply to SylvanoMTL

    ReqIf is a transfer format. I've used it to transfer requirement sets between different tools and different databases with the same tool. It is not without it's limitations. Mostly that it doesn't handle deletions very well.

    Given that Eclipse is free, its worth giving it a try. I had not come across that tool.

    At risk of someone throwing things at me, but there is also ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288: 2015 - System and Software Life Cycle Processes which is also available as the INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook. The contains a lot of good detail about how systems engineering processes should work. You will also find supporting material in the SEBoK (sebokwiki.org)

    There is also the INCOSE Guide to Writing Requirements which has some good practices. the useful thing with this guide is that it defines testable criteria for checking a requirement. Some tools even automate some of these checks now.

    What I've seen done is that during a peer review, the checklist is used against each requirement. In theory the person preparing the requirements could use the same checklist to check their work before submitting. We essentially had the checklist incorporated into our process.

    A lot of its is practice and training. Even with experienced requirements engineers, if the tool pushes you into writing multiple requirements in an object, they will. Using MS Word tends to cause this behaviour. But sometimes is difficult to write a single atomic requirement that is complete, testable, concise, which is also where you see multiple requirements being written. 

    Regards,

    Mark

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