Just another day in Paradise
Just before flying back to Europe I spend a weekend at my Friend Arno’s place in Florida. The USA contains both paradise and hell. Florida is paradise, Las Vegas is hell. I hate Las Vegas. But I love Florida, especially South-West Florida. Weather is really nice there, nature is beautiful. You can see all kinds of plants and animals that we don’t have at home. Hence the title picture. Normally I buy photo’s, this one was taken by me.
The USA has it’s nice things, Unsweetened Ice-Tea, free Re-Fills, brilliant weather. It has its flaw-backs as well…. But not too much in Florida…
This morning I woke up early to have some time to take a cup of coffee with Arno, who has to work today, before leaving for the airport. When I got out to the terrace next to the pool I noticed that it was not too warm. My friend Arno and his wife were both freezing… they already live in Florida for a long time and think that 14º C is very very cold. My European body reacted totally different, i thought it was nice and almost warm… That was 7am, on 9am it was already way over 20º…. things were back to normal… Also paradise has its requirements…. no temperature under 70ºF….;-)
Requirements
Speaking about requirements…. How do you get requirements in Rhapsody? There are a number of ways to do so. It also depends on what Requirements management tool you are using.
- Managing them in Rhapsody. You can do that but you will not like it that much. It is tiresome to handle requirements, there is not much overview and linking is a pain in the….. For a small program like a Stopwatch it is OK but anything bigger this is a no-go.
- Use DOORS to manage your requirements. Wait… Doors is old? Well, that depends. There are a large number of companies out there that use Doors since years and have large databases full of requirements, and mostly a complete workflow around the Tool using scripts and much more. Since Doors is still supported and even developed (to some extend) by IBM it is not a bad choice. You can synchronize your Requirements from Doors to Rhapsody using GateWay (Which is actually a Tool called Reqtify and is being maintained by a french company called Dassault (Yes, the ones that bought NoMagic) It can sync your Requirements between Rhapsody and Doors and it is fully configurable so you can also use it for other tools then Doors and you can select how you sync the Doors information in Rhapsody. It is and add-on tool, you have to pay for it. A cheaper and also very nice way to sync your Requirements between Doors and Rhapsody is the Willert Software Tools ReqXChanger. It uses the ReqIF format to exchange Requirements, it is also configurable so you can determine the exact information that you want to sync. In the latest version it can also exchange diagrams between Doors and Rhapsody!
- Use Doors Next (DNG) to manage your Requirements. This uses the Jazz Database to store Requirements and something called OSLC to sync the Requirements with other Tools. You would have to use Design Manager or the new Model Manager in Rhapsody to sync your Requirements with that. Design Manager and in lesser extend Model Manager need powerful hardware to run on. So if you are looking for a more “light-weight” solution, you can also consider our ReqXChanger, it is a low-price and low-performance using solution to exchange your requirements. You can still use it in a batch way (For instance in a nightly-build) to automatically keep Requirements and tracing information up-to-date.
- Use non-IBM Tools (like Polarion) to manage your requirements. Syncing can still be done with ReqXChanger. This is a big advantage of the ReqXChanger, it is very flexible in where you can use it. If you change your Requirement Management Tool (Or even your modeling tool…. but we will not talk about that….) you can continue using the ReqXChanger. If you use another tool then the named one and you would like to sync with Rhapsody, feel free to contact me!
Kicked out of Paradise
So. It’s time to pack and leave paradise… Modeling is definitively nicer if you do it in the sun with a glass of Ice-Tea. But modeling beats text-based programming always. Even when it’s cold outside.
Happy Modeling (and requirements implementing) with Rhapsody!
Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)
I totally agree, requirements are an important step, probably the most important one, when developping a new product. In most engineering domains there is a big variety of tools to choose from. But when it comes to requirements enginering respectively managment, there are only a few tools at hand. Doors or Polarion are for sure good appliences, but complicated to handle (at least Doors, wich I know) and quite expensive too. So there is a big hurdle for companies with smaller budgets. If in addition you need a lot of training, that you can work with the tools, it’s difficult to convince the managament of the necessity of a good requiremets tool!
Have a great day and see you.
I totally agree, requirements are an important step, probably the most important one, when developping a new product. In most engineering domains there is a big variety of tools to choose from. But when it comes to requirements enginering respectively managment, there are only a few tools at hand. Doors or Polarion are for sure good appliences, but complicated to handle (at least Doors, wich I know) and quite expensive too. So there is a big hurdle for companies with smaller budgets. If in addition you need a lot of training, that you can work with the tools, it’s difficult to convince the managament of the necessity of a good requiremets tool!
Have a great day and see you.