Managing requirements
Helix ALM manages the complete lifecycle of requirements, including planning, workflow, traceability, review, change management, and reporting. Helix ALM keeps team members, such as stakeholders, developers, and testers, informed about new requirements, helps them participate in the review process, and ensures they understand the impact of changes on deliverables.
You will work with requirements and requirement documents in Helix ALM.
Requirements
Requirements define a specific need or condition that must be met. Your team may have a variety of requirement types depending on the project goals. For example, business requirements focus on organizational goals, business rules, and processes that must be supported. Functional requirements describe what the product or service you are developing must do, such as the specific behavior of a software component.
Requirement documents
Requirement documents group and organize related requirements in an outline format. For example, you may want to add a document to group requirements based on functional area, release, or component.
Note: Keep in mind that Helix ALM may be customized for your team and use different terminology for requirements and documents. For example, if your team uses Agile, requirements may be used for user stories and documents may be used for epics.
Common tasks
Following are common tasks you may perform depending on your role, security permissions, and license type. For example, you may only review requirements and documents, add workflow events, and run reports.
Add requirements
Add new requirements to capture details and track all information throughout a requirement's lifecycle, including related email, workflow information, versions, related requirement documents, links to other requirements and items, file attachments, and history. See Adding requirements.
Add requirement documents
Requirements are typically grouped and organized in requirement documents. You can add documents before or after you add requirements. If you add a document first, you can add new or existing requirements to it. If you add requirements first, you can add a document when you are ready to organize the requirements and then add them to the document. See Adding requirement documents.
Review requirements and documents
You may be asked to review individual requirements or entire documents to provide feedback. When a requirement or document review is assigned to you, review it and add review notes with your feedback and questions. See Reviewing requirements and documents and Adding requirement and document review notes.
Update requirements and documents
Requirements and documents frequently require revisions based on reviewer feedback or new information. You can modify requirements and documents as needed until they are approved and ready for implementation. See Editing requirements and Modifying requirement documents.
If you complete work on a requirement or document, you may need to move it to the next step in your process or add information to it for other team members. To do this, you add workflow events, such as Assign to assign an item to another user or Comment to add additional information. See Adding workflow events to items.
View traceability information to analyze coverage and the impact of changes
A requirement may be linked to other Helix ALM items, such as test cases, or have a parent/child relationship to other requirements in a document. You can analyze traceability to get a complete picture of item relationships, which can help you determine the team's progress in validating requirements or confirm adequate test coverage. See Analyzing item traceability.
Before you make changes to requirements, you may want to know how the changes impact related items. You can perform an impact analysis to view related items, assess the risk of making changes, and identify items that need to be reviewed when changes are made. See Analyzing the impact of requirement changes.
Run reports to analyze requirement and document data
Reports can help you analyze project status and specific data about requirements, documents, and other items. See Running reports.
Ready to get started?
If you need to add or work with individual requirements, go to the Requirements list
If you need to add, review, or work with documents, go to the Requirement Documents list
