The Evolution of Rational Requirements Offerings

Requirements are the core of software and systems projects. They may affect every part of your delivery process. Teams using in-house tools to define and manage requirements, such as spreadsheets and word processing documents, can quickly develop problems with regards to reworking requirements, lost requirements, and serious project delays.

Studies on requirements practices have shown the following:

Requirements rework: Errors detected later in the development process can cost up to 200 times more than those detected at the beginning stages of development
Project impacts: Missing or late discovery of key requirements are leading causes of project delay and failure
Requirements delays: Being late to market by six months or more can cost organizations 33%

• Hear more about why investing in requirements is so important to your business

Rational offers best practices in requirements definition and requirements management for both the systems and IT domains, designed to help you:

• Converge faster on the right requirements, reduce project churn, and speed time-to-market
• Adapt seamlessly to changing priorities with greater visibility and actionable reporting
• Assist projects in meeting their business objectives by aligning development and test activities with project requirements

The Rational team is working to deliver some of the longer-term capabilities our customers have been asking for, while also ensuring we are protecting the investments customers have made in our offerings.

The key things we are working on now and in the near future include, but are not limited to:

• Infusing IBM Rational Jazz® services into Rational requirements offerings: The Jazz platform is the realization of Rational's vision of enabling complete software and systems delivery lifecycle governance. Jazz takes an innovative approach in breaking down the silos that separate the different disciplines of software and systems delivery, including requirements, architecture, and testing, with an integrated solution that enables whole-lifecycle collaboration, automation, and reporting that ultimately raises team effectiveness and individual productivity. The intention is for Rational’s requirements definition and management offerings to continue migrating to the Jazz platform. Check out the latest version of Requirements Composer on jazz.net.
• Implementing OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration): OSLC (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a new approach for software vendors and the open source community to meet industry demand for greater tool flexibility across the development lifecycle. OSLC enables common interfaces to be provided by multiple tools, making it easier for development teams to choose disparate tools and still efficiently share information between them. Rational intends to provide OSLC interfaces so, for example, a request from a particular tool for a requirement would use the same interface regardless of which product is being used at the time.