TechExcel Enters Requirements Management Market - Software Development Times On The Web

TechExcel Enters Requirements Management Market
Adds DevSpec, other tools, at company user conference
By Jeff Feinman

October 15, 2007 — TechExcel added requirements management to its arsenal at its 2007 Worldwide Users Conference and Training Summit in San Francisco, held last month.

The company introduced DevSpec, an integrated requirements management framework designed to provide visibility and traceability in project requirements. DevSpec allows developers to create new requirements and specifications that can be linked to development and testing implementation projects.

DevSpec provides automatic requirement versioning that triggers whenever specified changes are made, and uses a central data repository—running on either Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle Database—for requirements and specifications.

DevSpec groups requirements into specifications, which can then be manipulated. Developers can prioritize requirements, and be informed when any of the requirements are modified.

“The requirements can change, but that may or may not mean the specification changes,” explained Paul Unterberg, senior product manager of TechExcel. “It’s really up to the owners of the downstream development path and QA testing plan to look and see what this change means to them.”

Alex Gaber, director of business development for TechExcel, said that DevSpec would compete in the requirements management space with the likes of Telelogic Doors and IBM Rational RequisitePro.

The new KnowledgeWise leverages intellectual assets and links ideas and customer feedback to specific areas of a development project. Documents can be shared with all parties involved in the execution. The .NET-based tool can be integrated with all TechExcel products, including DevSpec, DevPlan and ServiceWise, and can use a variety of database back ends, including those from Microsoft, MySQL and Oracle.

“From a product management standpoint, if I wanted to see what the top requested features of my product are, I can load KnowledgeWise, and based on those attributes that each document has, I can see the top requests,” Unterberg said.

Another new addition to TechExcel’s product base is SpecDD, an agile development tool that starts with the premise that designs and requirements have to be agile, but within a structured development process. Unterberg called it a “high-level framework that develops software, and measures designs around that development.”

Unterberg said that TechExcel, with the help of these new products, is trying to help businesses represent their ideal working processes in a way that’s easy to implement. “Those processes can be modeled and enforced within our software, but they don’t get in the way of people using the software. Our interface allows them to use those tools in a process-enforced way, and get meaningful data from that tool use.”

EMAIL THIS ARTICLE

SEND FEEDBACK