Fast trekkin' to requirements

Who's afraid of requirements management?

Fastrak is really all about managing development and operational risk and, however easy it is to use, will require some sophistication from its users and their managers if they are going to get the best out of it. So, Telelogic is providing new training courses in requirements management best practice; and there is some receptiveness towards the idea of an online Fastrak developer community (although nothing is planned at the moment).

The tool itself seems to offer rich functionality at first glance. Import from spreadsheet (a fairly common unstructured requirements repository) is supported and there is a "find similar" semantic search, which doesn't rely on the precise wording of a requirement in order to find it. Fastrak stores its data in a single repository (a PostgreSQL database is supplied; Oracle is also supported) and access is via a browser and Apache Tomcat application server.

The tool can differentiate between stakeholder requests and derived technical requirements (and the labels applied to things can be customised to suit your company's terminology). It appears to have a state-oriented view of requirements and can chart a timeline of progress through the different requirements states - and identify bottlenecks. It can also link test cases to requirements.

Automated version control is built in. It's fairly basic but supports version numbers, an audit trail log (the who, what, when of change) and rollback.

Metrics are provided for traceability and completeness (this is good) but not, so far at least, for project complexity.

However, perhaps the most exciting thing about Fastrak is that it's available using a hosted SaaS model (from a Telelogic server farm in Sweden). So, the cost-of-entry to Requirements Management is now much reduced and low-risk, hands-off, pilot evaluations are possible – a hosted Fastrak evaluation is available here, in exchange for registration. This is probably the most useful way forward for requirements management in general development – I already know (under NDA) of another hosted requirements management tool that will be launched later this month (watch this space).

I am quite sure that automated requirements management itself will become mainstream. The only question is when. This is largely because of the increasing focus on good IT governance in the widest sense.

In so many fields, regulation is being stepped up and the regulators will want to see transparency through from their operational governance requirements, as well as the business' requirements, to features in the runtime code. ®