Development of a Document Generator for a Requirements Management Tool
The Challenge
Our customer, a well-known manufacturer of automobiles, has introduced a tool for require-ments management (RM) to be used through-out the company. The requirements that are administered with that tool represent the main part of specifications that the customer passes on to his suppliers. However, the requirements management tool itself offers only limited pos-sibilities to create reports and to generate documents.
At the beginning, HOOD developed a proto-type document generator and widely applied it. Due to its limited functionality the prototype could not readily be applied throughout the whole company.
But nonetheless the protoype served for col-lecting requirements of developers and end users, and these requirements could be used to sketch a mature solution to be applied throughout the company.
Due to its many years of experience with work-ing with the customer’s requirements man-agement tool and due to its knowledge of the problem domain, the HOOD Group could face the challenge of developing a document gen-erator that would satisfy all the various desires as much as possible.
Meeting the challenge
HOOD started eliciting the requirements of identified representatives of the end user community, using the prototype amongst oth-ers. These requirements were prioritised to-gether with the customer and the scope of the first release was agreed on.
HOOD wrote a detailed business concept and an IT concept, and both were agreed on with the customer.
At a very late stage during the development the customer made significant change re-quests regarding the IT architecture. In spite of the critical point of time HOOD managed to quickly react to these change requests and to keep control of the effects and impacts of the changes. The first release of the software could be delievered on time, together with the corresponding documentation.
After that, HOOD coordinated the development of a service level agreement and consequently provided itself the 3rd level support. During the maintenance of the software and using the customer’s own tools for change management and requirements management, HOOD en-sured the traceability of the requirements through the following levels:
- a) original problem ticket
- b) change request
- c) derived requirements
- d) test plans
Figure 1 Document Generator
Customer Value
- At present, the customer successfully uses this software developed by HOOD to gener-ate all specifications whose requirements are administered with the requirements man-agement tool
- The customer got a solution developed by HOOD without having to build up detailed and costly know-how about the requirements mangement tool and programming lan-guages
- The customer has a clear overview of which requirements are already implemented and which are still pending.
