Additional benefits of RMsis when compared to JIRA for Requirements Management

Owned by Sanjay Sahani
Last updated: May 31, 2019
3 min read

Question : Can you please explain what additional benefits RMsis have when compared to JIRA for requirements management?

Answer :

Following are some of the functionalities exclusively available in RMsis which are not present in JIRA:

  • Versioning of Requirements.
    • During the life cycle of a project, the requirements of the project may change as new requirements are added and existing requirements are updated or removed. Some requirements may change a multiple number of times throughout the life cycle of the project. It becomes important to track what changes were made to which version of the requirement. Due to these reasons, versioning of requirements becomes an important part of the requirements management.

    • Requirements versioning is the process of documenting and maintaining a history of all changes made to an individual requirement. The primary use of versioning an individual requirement is to

      • Enable the project team to determine how and why a requirement has changed over time.
      • Enable the team to determine who made changes to a requirement.
      • Help ensure that the project team is working on the exact same requirement.
  • Creating Baseline.
    • As per IEEE, Baseline is defined as: A specification or product that has been formally reviewed and agreed upon, that thereafter serves as the basis for further development, and that can be changed only through formal change control procedures.
    • One of the major reasons for project failure is “scope and requirements creep”. In absence of a baseline, the stakeholders of a project including the customer and the team tend to make multiple changes to the requirements (since they may be tempted to add new features) while the project is in progress. This change may result in new requirements being added to the requirement set or updating the existing requirements. However, if the requirements keep on changing or new requirements being added, the project scope gets affected. This may result in delay in the project schedule and increase in the project budget OR the project quality may be impacted.
    • It becomes important to baseline the requirements and put them under change control so that
      • the project can be planned, estimated and executed in a time bound and efficient manner.
      • Changes (if any) and their impact is shared with all stakeholders.
    • A baseline captures a snapshot of the entire project at a specific moment in time and represents the agreed-upon, reviewed, and approved set of requirements committed to a specific product release.
    • Baseline can also be used as a basis of contract between two parties. Examples of scenarios in which baseline is used, can be as follows :
      1. Fixed bid contract between a Supplier and Customer, where Baseline is used as a basis for Deliverables, Timeline and Cost.
      2. Agreement between Marketing and Development Teams, where Baseline is used to define the Functionality against a release.
      3. Iterative discussion and conclusion of Specifications for a Sprint. The Baseline identifies a set of Requirements, which will not change in course of the Sprint.
    • Detailed information for Requirement Versions, Baseline and History in RMsis is available here: https://docs.optimizory.com/x/-46d
  • Committing the requirements.
    • Many times, it is required to freeze the requirements after some initial analysis of the requirements so that the basic attributes of the requirements are not changed during the development cycle.
  • Traceability.
    • Certain contracts and situations mandate you to prove that all requirements are met / complied with (like defense contracts or drug trials etc) ... in such cases traceability is an indispensable feature.
    • RMsis provides a Traceability view which shows end to end traceability between Requirements, linked requirements, test cases and JIRA issues.
    • Detailed information for Traceability View in RMsis is available here: https://docs.optimizory.com/x/2o6d
  • Reporting
    • Reporting is one of the most important part in requirements management.
    • RMsis provides the capability to generate various kind of reports like Generic Reports (Reports having data of requirements, entities linked with requirements upto multiple levels), Custom Reports, Specific Reports (which includes Baseline Difference, Requirements Difference, Activity Tracking and Test Run Regression reports)
    • Detailed information for reporting in RMsis is available here: https://docs.optimizory.com/x/2I6d