Software Planner - Application Life Cycle Management

Software Planner can track the workflow of your requirements, allowing you to analyze the number of requirements that are new, awaiting approval, awaiting estimate, approved, rejected, closed, etc. These workflow states are fully configurable.

Organizing your Requirements

Software Planner allows you to organize your Requirements any way you wish. For example, you may consider organizing Requirements by software release, agile sprint, etc. Or you may decide to do it by product line, software release, etc. When adding new requirements, it is a good idea to use a numbering scheme that will make sets of requirements easy to identify. A common way to do this is to come up with a standard naming convention.

Integrating Requirements with Project Management

If you plan to use the project management features of Software Planner, you can easily integrate the requirements area with the project management area. A good approach is to define your requirements for your software release, then create a project plan for the software release.

Creating Requirement Documents

It is a good idea to create a requirement document that describes the feature being developed and contains prototypes that can be used by the team to fully understand how the feature is to be implemented. Doing this has many benefits:

• The file can be emailed to your client for approval. Since the file contains screen shots and prototypes, it will be clear as to exactly how the feature will work.
• The file can be used by your quality assurance team to create test cases from and to ensure traceability and test coverage for the Requirement.
• The file can be used by your programming staff so that they understand fully how the feature should work.

Requirement Reporting and Dashboards

Once your requirements are entered, you can analyze them with our built-in reports and dashboards.

Reports

• Requirements Missing Test Cases Traceability – This shows you how many requirements you have that have no test cases.
• Requirements Missing Test Cases Traceability by Folder – This shows you how many requirements you have that have no test cases and separates this by folder.
• Requirements Trending by Status Last 30 days – This shows you how many requirements you have, by status, over the past 30 days. This is used for determining how quickly items are being approved, estimated, etc.
• Requirements by Assignee, Project, Status – This graphs the requirements by assignee, identifying how many items are assigned to each team member. You can drill down on the charts and summarized information to view the details of each Requirement. This can be run for a single project or all projects and can hide closed items if desired.
• Requirements by Assignee, Status, Project – Similar to the prior report, this one sorts the data by assignee, status then project and is drillable.
• Requirements by Project, Folder, Status – Similar to the prior report, this one sorts the data by project, folder and status. If your folders represent releases, this is an easy way to analyze requirements by software release.
• Requirements by Project, Status – Similar to the prior report, this one sorts by project and status and is drillable. When run for all projects, it allows you to compare the number and status of requirements across all your projects.
• Requirements by Project, Status, Group, Subgroup – If you elect to use groups and subgroups, this report can analyze your requirements by those groups and subgroups within project and status. For example, you could use group to signify your product line name and subgroup as modules within the product line. By linking these to each requirement, you can analyze the information at that level.
• Requirements by Status, Group, Subgroup – Similar to the prior report, this report aggregates the information by status, rolling up multiple projects into one report when run for all projects.
• Requirements by Status, Projects – Similar to the prior report, this ignores grouping and subgrouping and analyzes the requirements by status then project.
• Requirements with Detail – is accessible via the Reports tab / Ad-hoc Detail. From here, choose the Requirements Report and then choose a filter to restrict the items shown on the report, the fields to show on the report, and the sort order. You can also choose to send the report to others via email by entering a list of email addresses, separated by semicolons.
• Ad-hoc summary report can be accessed by clicking the Reports tab / Ad-hoc Summary. From here, choose Requirement Summary. This report analyzes the number of requirements you have, grouped by any fields you desire. This report is excellent for preparing for meetings where you are discussing the progress of your release.