Importing and maintaining externally managed requirements in RMsis

Owned by Sanjay Sahani
Sept 17, 2016
2 min read

This functionality is being introduced from RMsis version 1.8.7 onwards.

Introduction and Context

For many large systems, sometimes the System Requirements may be managed in other systems (like IBM DOORS), while specific software components may be developed using RMsis. This functionality is being implemented to support such scenarios.

Since the Requirements are managed externally and evolve there, they will exist inside RMsis in a READ_ONLY (committed) state. So a user will be able to cross reference them inside RMsis, but not modify them.

Once some evolution has happened, the Requirements can be re-imported into RMsis as the next version.

Procedure

  1. Export the Requirements from external system with all their attributes in CSV format and import these in RMsis using the same.
  2. In RMsis Database, a field External_ID is provided.
  3. Map Requirement_ID of Externally Managed Requirements to External_ID in RMsis.
  4. ID field should not be mapped during the import process.
  5. System will commit the imported Requirements, as soon as the Requirement is imported.
  6. User can create a new version by mapping Requirement_ID of Externally Managed Requirements to External_ID in RMsis and re-importing the Requirement again.

Expected usability issues and their resolution

Some usability issues are perceived in the re-import process. For example, the users might have created cross references to the imported Requirements within RMsis.If the number of Requirements is large, this can lead to lot of rework for the users. In order to resolve this problem, the following supporting functions will be provided (maybe in a later version)

  1. Bulk operations to copy Requirement Links of any version to the latest version.
  2. Bulk operations to move Requirement Links of any version to the latest version.
  3. Bulk operations to Edit / Update dependencies.

Limitations of this approach

  1. An RMsis-ID will be auto-generated on import and will be used for cross referencing inside RMsis.
  2. External-ID cannot be used for cross referencing within RMsis (for traceability purposes)

Notes

  1. There will be no special treatment for editable and non-editable attributes of a Requirement.
  2. In case the user manually creates another version of a Requirement in RMsis (say n) and performs an import, we will create the version (n+1) during import.