Importing and maintaining externally managed requirements in RMsis

Owned by Sanjay Sahani
Last updated: Oct 20, 2016
3 min read

This functionality is available from RMsis 1.8.7 (and later versions)

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 provided 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.
  2. Switch to Planned Requirements view in RMsis and click on "CSV Import" button.
  3. Select the CSV file to be imported in step 1 of the import process and click on "Next Step" button.
  4. In step 2 of the import process, map the source attributes (attributes present in CSV file) with the target attributes (attributes present in RMsis). While mapping the attributes,
    • ID field should not be mapped.
    • Map Requirement_ID of Externally Managed Requirements to External_ID in RMsis and click on "Next Step" button.
  5. In step 3 of the import process, map values of attributes in CSV file with values of attributes in RMsis and click on the "Import" button.
  6. The requirements in the CSV file will be imported in RMsis at the bottom of Planned Requirements table.
  7. System will commit the imported Requirements, as soon as the Requirement is imported.
  8. User can create a new version by mapping Requirement_ID of Externally Managed Requirements to External_ID in RMsis and re-importing the requirements 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 have been provided in RMsis 1.8.7 (and later versions)

  1. "Move Links to Latest Version" operation to move Links/ association of any version of a requirement to the latest version of the requirement.
  2. "Copy Links to Latest Version" operation to copy Links/ association of any version of a requirement to the latest version of the requirement.

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.