Tool Mentor: Identify and Outline Business Requirements using IBM Rational Requirements Composer |
Use IBM(R) Rational(R) Requirements Composer to identify and outline requirements.
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Related Elements | Describe the Business
Main Description
#### Gather information With RRC, business analysts and software development teams use an integrated, diverse set of requirements definition techniques to gather and develop requirements: Capture background information, stakeholder needs, project objectives, functional and non functional requirements and other information in textually rich documents. Create use-case diagrams Create links from elements in one artifact to other project artifacts. Or, link to external Web sites. Review artifacts as a team and embed comments. Create a project glossary and terms that are integrated with project artifacts. Create requirements from document text and other elements and add requirements to Rational RequisitePro. Or, import requirements from Rational RequisitePro. When a requirement is created in RRC, it becomes an artifact – essentially its own rich text document. By creating requirement artifacts in RRC, you can take advantage of the tool’s rich features to organize them (using, for example, Attribute Groups and folders), relate them to other artifacts and evolve them collaboratively with the help of the Comments function. Requirements can be created in three different ways in RRC: You can create a requirement from an artifact element, such as a business process task or a use case. See Creating requirements from artifact elements. You can select any passage of text in a rich text document to create a new requirement artifact. The selected text becomes the name of, and a link to, new requirement artifact. By choosing to embed the text of the new requirement in the document, you will ensure that any changes to the requirement itself stay in sync between the two artifacts. See Creating requirements in documents. You can create a requirement using the New Requirement wizard. See Creating requirements using a wizard. #### Capture domain terms RRC provides built in capabilities to develop a glossary of terms that are drafted and published as part of the project. Create new terms or add existing terms from the repository into the glossary. Glossary terms can contain links to new and existing artifacts, related terms, synonyms, comments, and acronyms. Assign attributes to the glossary and view, filter, and sort links to other artifacts using the sidebar. See Creating a Glossary #### Identify the types of requirements relevant to your system Review the RRC repository with all different requirements related artifacts, to help identify the right requirements types that suit the project best. Decide if the project requires additional requirement types to be defined (such as system-wide, usability, or user interface requirements), depending on the complexity of the project artifacts in each domain. See Creating requirements You can choose to author and manage requirements in a Rational® RequisitePro® project and then import them into a Rational Requirements Composer project for more definition and elaboration, or you can define requirements in Rational Requirements Composer and then add them to a Rational RequisitePro project. Note: When adding requirements to Rational RequisitePro, you must integrate with a project that contains requirement types that are compatible with requirements that you are adding from Rational Requirements Composer. See Configuring the integration with Rational RequisitePro #### Identify and capture use cases and scenarios Create a use-case diagram to illustrate the relationship between multiple use cases, actors. In RRC, you have the ability to link individual use cases and other elements in the diagram to use-case description documents and other artifacts. See Creating a use case diagram You can create a quick 'sketch' for easy communication or fully define reusable use cases and actors. Once an actor has been defined (using a rich text document, it is saved as a reusable artifact in the RRC repository. See Creating an actor description Review business process sketches in RRC to help identify the scope of automation for the system and identify Use Cases. RRC provides the flexibility to begin with a Use Case diagram or a Use Case description. Once a diagram has been created, you can create a use-case description that provides textual detail for a single use case in a diagram by choosing to elaborate that use case (this also saves the use case as a reusable artifact in the repository rather than just a drawing in the diagram). The rich text editor provides the capability to capture use cases in a common textual format, similar to other word processing tools. It is best to promote consistency and create a project template that can be reused for all use case descriptions. See Creating a use case description The concept of a Scenario doesn’t exist in the RRC tool, but can easily be included in your use case description documents and captured as a separate requirement type. Scenarios are a powerful way of capturing an end to end narrative about the user interaction with the system and help to identify storyboards and test cases. #### Identify and capture system-wide requirements There are several other types of requirement that you might want to capture for your system such as business rules, messages, and system-wide requirements.. These requirements can be captured using the rich text editor, and marked as a requirement. See Creating documents #### Achieve concurrence As the team is capturing requirements related artifacts in RRC, the team can collaborate by adding comments and replies to documents and artifacts. You can also add comments and replies to specific paragraphs in documents and elements in artifacts. Comments are displayed in the Comments section of the sidebar and in the Recent Comments section of the project page sidebar. They are visible to all team members who have access to the artifact. See Working with comments You can also add user-defined, shared tags and links to new and existing artifacts. Tags help your team categorize artifacts in a project. You can view all artifacts that have the same tag by filtering your display in the project area dashboard. See Adding tags to artifacts Links are used as a mechanism for referring to related information. You can create links to existing requirements from a document or from an artifact element, such as a business process task or a use case. A link can originate from an artifact, an element within an artifact, a document, or a range of text within a document. You can quickly navigate between related artifacts using the Links section in the sidebar. The Links section shows outgoing links (links to other artifacts) and incoming links (links from other artifacts). See Working with links
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