Rational Requirements Composer

IBM Rational Requirements Composer is a ‘next generation’ requirements management tool – it is part of IBM’s Collaborative Life-cycle Management tool-set on the Jazz platform. It claims to use ‘just enough’ process, in conjunction with a web-based application, to let you manage requirements effectively for iterative, waterfall and agile-at-scale development methodologies (always remembering that true Waterfall was always intended to be an iterative process, of course). It emphasises agile delivery of business outcomes through collaborative development by global teams: enabling all stakeholders (including the customer sponsor, users, marketing, legal and compliance, finance, education, operations and developers) to achieve rapid consensus on requirements and their priority – which could contribute to a DevOps culture.

Requirements Composer supports requirements capture; traceability; collaborative review; visual requirements definition; progress and status reporting; and an audit history of changes to requirements. It can be seen as complementing IBM’s other requirements management tools by adding collaboration, capture and visual modelling capabilities on top of their requirements management capabilities.

Rational Requirements Composer is available, and supported, globally. Licenses can be bought through normal IBM channels. However it can also be downloaded from jazz.net and potential users can try it out in a web-based ‘sandbox’ environment, from a web browser, Eclipse client, Visual Studio client etc.; and potential collaborators can be invited to join in the trial. 

Requirements Composer is aimed at Agile developers in the enterprise, especially those aiming for ‘agile at scale’. However, it is available to a much wider community than this via jazz.net on the web.

Rational Requirements Composer is a web application running on a wide range of desktops: Windows or various flavours of Linux. Its server runs on various flavours of Linux, on Windows Server, Sun Solaris, AIX IBM Power System and VMWare. It uses a wide range of databases to hold requirements data and metadata; Apache Derby is included but D2, Oracle and SQL Server are also supported. Apache Tomcat application server is included, but WebSphere is also supported

It supports the Open Services for Life-cycle Collaboration (OSLC) specifications, so it can integrate with a range of development tools from IBM (and, potentially, other vendors).

What this all means is that Rational Requirements Composer isn’t dependent on being deployed in all-IBM environments, which might not have been so true of past IBM tools.

IBM offers all the services (consultancy, training etc.), available across the globe, that one might expect to need in support of this product.

Paricularly noteworthy is the Jazz Community at jazz.net, which represents IBM’s next generation of interactive, collaborative tools for delivering buisiness outcomer from smarter automated systems. jazz.net is a lot more than a conventional product support site  and according to IBM “we use our products to build our products, right here at Jazz.net. You can track our plans, talk to the developers, and try our latest stuff. Help us build the tools that you’re dreaming about!”. There does, indeed, seem to be a buzz around jazz.net.

Rational Requirements Composer is also part of the OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) community for tool integration

A wide range of training courses, both classroom and e-Learning, for Rational Requirements Composer are available from IBM and its partners.