Top 5 requirements management tools

Identifying and managing business requirements is among the most critical steps in ensuring project deliverables are on point. Here are the top tools to help you execute your requirements management plan.

Contributing writer, CIO |

Top 5 requirements management tools
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Your team's ability to navigate business requirements plays a pivotal role in project success. To provide stakeholders with the high-quality deliverables they expect, you must understand and manage their requirements. Here, requirements management tools can help your team accurately capture, prioritize, track, and report what key stakeholders require of your project.

Here we take a look at the top requirements management tools available today. Offering collaboration, history tracking, prioritization, status reporting, report summaries, requirements traceability, and user-defined attributes, each of these tools can be a valuable addition to your requirements management plan. They are all cloud-based and accessible from Android and iOS devices. Read along to find out which best suits your business.

Helix RM

Perforce's Helix RM helps teams capture, decompose, and prioritize requirements, identify the status of each requirement within the approval process, perform requirements reviews, stay up-to-date with changes, and collaborate with all stakeholders. The tool also enables companies to reuse requirements for other projects to reduce validation time, rework, and ensure consistency across projects. Requirements can be linked to other requirements, test cases and results, or source code. Helix RM offers a traceability matrix to help teams better identify root causes. Impact analysis to run what-if scenarios and bug tracking and task management can be completed alongside Jira. All collaboration with stakeholders can be done in real-time so that everyone is up-to-date on changes as they happen.

Pricing: Perforce offers a 30-day free trial of Helix RM through their online sign-up form. Contact Perform for pricing.

Integrations: Helix RM integrates with Atlassian Jira, Atlassian Bamboo, Microsoft products, Slack, Adobe, ActiveState Komodo, Apache Maven, Amazon Lumberyard, Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, Crytek CRYENGINE, DBmaestro TeamWork, Eclipse, ElectricFlow, GitHub, Go2Group ConnectALL, IBM Rational DOORS, IBM Aspera, JetBrains, Puppet, Prometheus, Thoughtworks, Unity, and many other applications.

Jira

Atlassian's Jira is one of the most recognized tools used by teams for application lifecycle management (ALM) and requirements management. Jira helps teams identify and map business requirements, collaborate with stakeholders, ensure all tasks connect directly back to any capture requirements, and provide stakeholders with high-quality deliverables. Jira makes it easy to see how business requirements and existing issues are linked, trace project tasks back to business requirements, and determine how requirements differ from a baseline. Jira also allows stakeholders to create and view a requirements hierarchy structure.

Pricing: JIRA has cloud or self-managed pricing options. The cloud option offers two price tiers: $10 per user per month for up to 10 team members, and $7 per user per month for 11-100 users. Both tiers come with a 7-day free trial. The self-managed option is hosted on your server and offers two pricing tiers: The first tier requires a one-time payment that ranges from $10 for a maximum of 10 users, up to $38,000 for a maximum of 10,000 users; the second tier is for data centers and starts at $12,000 per year for 500 users and goes up to $120,000 per year for 50,001+ users. The self-managed pricing tiers come with a 30-day free trial.

Integrations: JIRA has an extensive list of integrations, including project management, administrative tools, utilities, blueprints, charts and diagramming, CRM, dashboards, coding, email, document management, support desk, security, testing and more. The Atlassian website offers a complete listing of Jira's current 714 integrations.

Orcanos

The Orcanos application life management (ALM) and requirements management (RM) tool is a flexible yet powerful solution that provides a single repository for requirements management in small to large companies. It is medical-device-compliant for manufacturers of medical devices and offers end-to-end traceability, impact analysis, real-time dashboards, alerts, and notifications. Orcanos offers a requirements traceability tool that facilitates tracking coverage and traceability of system, hardware, or software requirements, test cases, risks, and more. Stakeholders can get a hierarchical view of their requirements and collaborate through email, instant messaging, alerts, or notifications. Orcanos also provides an Microsoft Word document generator that supports embedded reports and customized templates.

Pricing: Orcanos offers three pricing options: Basic ALM at $69 per user per month, for up to 5 users; Advanced ALM at $89 per user per month, and Premium ALM at $119 per user per month. Each package comes with a 30-day free trial.

Integrations: Contact Orcanos for a list of all application integrations.

ReQtest

The ReQtest requirements management tool places focus on end-to-end project management with an efficient user experience. ReQtest offers a test management module for acceptance testers, advanced bug tracking to help your team identify how effective its bug tracking process is, and an intuitive agile board to track and manage tasks. The tool simplifies the cumbersome process of identifying and managing the business, marketing, functional, nonfunctional, user interface or other requirements. Business requirements are stored in a tree-like structure where teams can easily see, plan, and manage everything more effectively.

Pricing: Two pricing options are available: Small Team for up to 10 users at $10 per user per month, or Professional for unlimited users at $45 per user per month. Each package comes with a 10-day free trial.

Integrations: ReQtest integrates with Jira; customizable integrations are also offered via API.

Visure Requirements

Visure Requirements offers a tool that provides essential support to the end-to-end business requirements process. The tool is aimed at standardizing and enforcing clearly defined processes and formalizing a common requirements specification structure. It manages changes throughout the application lifecycle and captures, analyzes, validates, traces, and enables the reuse of requirements. Stakeholders can create product families that share a set of common requirements, standards requirements, or features alongside tests or use cases. As a multi-user tool with versioning capabilities, various stakeholders are able to make changes to the same requirement simultaneously without encountering any issues.

Pricing: Visure offers a free trial of its requirements management tool through its online form.

Integrations: Integrations with third-party tools include Doors, HP ALM, RiskCAT, Jira, and Enterprise Architect.

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