One of the major goals of business analysts is improving productivity. According to a survey, the average rating business analysts give their tools is 5 out of 10. 74% of the respondents rated their tools at less than 7 out of 10. What are the major problems are facing with regards to requirements management?

  • Finding incorrect or missing links between requirements
  • Getting project stats
  • Seeing the impact of a requirement change on other requirements and use cases
  • Duplication of requirements between different documents

When we consider that less than a third of business analysts are using specialized requirements management tools, it becomes clear that these problems could be mitigated through better software. The majority of analysts today use Word and Excel, which are simply not meant to keep track of requirements in a way that would solve these issues.

The requirements aren’t just text, they are highly structured information. They have dependencies and references. Changing one requirement can trigger a chain of changes to other requirements. They can be grouped by components, or phases.

We would like to see an online application which takes this into account and allow business analysts to work effectively, without the tedious work of updating links by hand or duplicating requirements between various documents. We also think that a requirements management tool should handle more than just software development projects. The fact that everything is online will make it easier for distributed teams and means there is no need to involve the IT department.