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Improving Requirements Quality with reQLab

By Adrian Whitfield

In case you missed it, we just released Polarion 19. If you haven’t read about the new release you can do so here. But we are not done yet. We have more exciting news to share with you from our great partners.

So ….. In today’s blog, I want to talk to you about Requirements Quality.

A major discipline during the development phase of any system is requirements engineering. Requirements engineering is typically performed during the initial analysis phase of a project but that does not necessarily mean the quality of a specification and all its requirements is in a desired state.

To ensure that the quality of a certain specification matches the needs of every stakeholder multiple iterations and many discussions throughout the creation of the specification are typically required. Either the project manager or the developers often neglect this time-consuming process.

What if those multiple iterations on requirements or many discussions to clarify the meaning or understanding of requirements could be made more efficient? This is exactly where reQlab from IT-Designers can help save the day. Instead of discussing in long-lasting meetings that some requirements are not specified in detail reQlab will tell you. It feels like an expert requirements engineer is sitting next to you whispering what parts of your currently written requirements should be improved.

With the help of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, deep learning methods and machine learning algorithms reQlab is able to analyze your requirements in the way they should be written. It is able to adapt the needs of your specifications, e.g. allowing negations in your requirements or using only one of the three modal verbs. reQlab is also tuned to your industry and domain. Rather than simply having a „one size fits all“ tool to ensure the best results reQlab is trained on individual customer datasets. This means the results reQlab delivers are highly aligned to end customer needs rather than to general cases.

If you are writing your specifications in English or German, no matter …. both languages are supported for the analysis and the resulting outcome.

Since the team at IT-Designers work with requirements every day themselves, they know how painful it can be to switch between several development tools just for writing the documentation. Therefore, reQlab is tightly integrated into Polarion. The only thing you have to do is save your document with the requirements you want to be analyzed, just as you would normally save your Polarion live-docs. There is no need to export a copy of your document and feed some other system with it.

After the analysis is finished, you get a detailed result of the requirements check. It contains different suggestions depending on which errors reQlab detected. Through the tight integration into Polarion, you are able to see directly which part of your requirement might be in need of improvement. It is as if a review takes place the same time you are writing your requirements.

So, start saving valuable time, stop charging the project’s budget, and increase your system’s quality with the use of reQlab!

reQlab is available today and more information concerning reQlab is available on the Polarion extensions portal.

Are you new to Polarion? Do you want to give Polarion a trial at your organization? If the answer is yes then feel free to download or use a cloud instance to see if it meets your needs. Please go to this link for the trial.

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reQLab from IT Designers. Improving Requirements Quality.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/polarion/improving-requirements-quality-with-reqlab/