Reports Ruin Requirements Management
Posted by Doug Feuerbach on May 18, 2008
Something we see often in requirements management software is the use of hierarchical trees for presenting requirements. Hierarchical trees are cumbersome not only because you’re constantly collapsing and expanding ‘nodes’ to find what you need, but you have to keep track of where you are. Why are hierarchical views used so often?
I think fault lies with the preeminence given to the hardcopy requirements document, largely because of its contractual importance in governments and large organizations, or aging cultural values. As a result, a lot of requirements management software unwittingly strives for the usability of a stack of paper, and is relegated to being a complex book-keeping and report generating utility. While reports may be important, they have nothing to do with using the requirements to get work done, and getting work done is SamePage’s sweet spot.
SamePage is work-driven. It strives to keep you focused on the information that is most relevant to your work by organizing everything into three horizontal panes for Base Requirements, Derived Requirements and Tasks. Each pane gives you intuitive filtering to isolate the requirements or tasks you care about, and you may jump to a set of related requirements or tasks in their respective pane by ‘sliding’. In Simple Mode, you have a single Requirements pane, and everything is at your fingertips without sliding.
In large projects, you’re likely to spend most of your time in the Derived Requirements and Tasks panes if you’re a software developer. If you’re doing requirements analysis, you’ll spend a lot of time between the Base and Derived Requirements panes. You can jump between panes while retaining the context of the requirement or task by clicking on a nubbin (nubbins are experimental and will likely be tweaked a bit)–this approach gets you to the information you need quickly without having to remember where you are. Watch the video snippet below to see this in action and see how we avoided the abominable tree widget.
