Requirements Tools
Free and Commercial Tools for Extracting, Creating, Editing, Checking, Validating, Analysing, Modelling, Animating, Simulating, Documenting, Prioritising, Managing, Filtering and Exporting Requirements

Tools change rapidly, so both vendors' claims and independent comments may be outdated.
Caveat emptor.

Accept 360° from Accept Software Corporation

is a requirements management tool that also supports product planning. Tools help users to define and track feature dependencies with tree diagrams, and to relate these to the market, project plans, implementation considerations and competitor analyses.

Accompa from Accompa

is a requirements management service provided on the Web for a small monthly fee per user. It can be customised with any number of fields and reports using sorts and filters. It has Web 2 style collaboration mechanisms for discussing and agreeing requirements. A Wizard guides the creation of specifications, which can be exported to Word, HTML, Excel, PDF.

Raj Patel of Accompa, Inc. writes: "Accompa is an affordable, web-based requirement tool that enables product managers and project managers to capture, track and manage requirements. It can be customized right from the web-interface to fit an organization's needs. It features extensive collaboration features such as integrated discussion boards and social tags. A 30-day free trial is available."

Active Focus from Falafel Software (formerly Xapware)

is said to support the software application life-cycle.

Agility from Agile Edge

is a tracking database for user requirements, issues, tasks and bug tracking, permitting tracing between these items. There is a simple user interface displaying a table of items with status, symbols and text.

Aligned Elements from Aligned AG

is a tool for handling requirements traceability and risk in the medical device industry. It includes a Requirements Management module. Its purpose is to handle all the evidence needed in the strict regulatory environment of medical devices. This seems to represent a trend (cf Comply Pro) towards specialised products performing essentially familiar RM tasks but using the language of a particular domain.

Karl Johan Larsson of Aligned writes: "Aligned Elements is a requirement management solution targeted towards the Medical Device industry and is essentially built to manage Design History Files. Aligned Elements incorporate all relevant parts of the DHF Management process such as specifications, test cases, FMEA risk analysis, structured reviews, trace analysis, validation checks and is controlled by FDA QSR 21 CFR Part 11 user management etc."

AnalystPro from Goda Software

supports requirements editing and traceability, change control, diagrams including use cases, and other features of full RM tools at a low price per seat.

Kris of Goda Software, Inc writes:
Analyst Pro is an affordable, scalable and collaborative tool for requirements tracking, traceability analysis and document management. It is easily deployable and customizable to your project needs."

Arcway Cockpit from Arcway AG

is a visual RE tool in which written requirements provide the bridge between different "visual landscapes" such as the business landscape and the IT landscape. The "landscapes" are defined visually with block diagrams or "maps" showing interfaces between people, processes, and software. The diagramming notation and visual concept seems to be unique to Arcway, while the idea of tracing between business processes and IT systems is classical but very freshly expressed. The examples seem to be strongly oriented to transactions and databases: whether the concept would work for other kinds of systems is unclear, though the principle of connecting events in the world to events and structures in the machine is quite general. This looks like the most exciting new product of 2007.

Peter Aschenbrenner of Arcway AG writes:
"ARCWAY Cockpit is a tool for managing requirements. It supports ARCWAY’s concept of visual requirements engineering (VRE). In VRE requirements are linked to visual high-level models of the system under design. Requirements specified in ARCWAY Cockpit can be imported from and exported to MS Excel. A fully customizable MS Word, HTML and Docbook report interfaces allows for ad-hoc reports of specific requirements or complete specification documents."

Blueprint from Blueprint Inc.

This tool (formerly Profesy) won the 2005 Gartner Cool Vendor prize for being “innovative, impactful, and intriguing”. It was sold as a 'Visual Requirements Definition and Validation product' and is said to integrate intelligently with a range of 3rd-party tools. It assists with the creation of requirements, flowcharts, test scenarios and documentation.

Tony Higgins of Sofea writes:
Profesy provides a unified approach to Requirements Definition and Test Development. 1) For Requirements Definition, it provides business analysts with a powerful workbench to model, simulate, and validate business processes, business requirements and system requirements together to create a collaborative and highly visual elicitation, definition and approval process. 2) For Test Development, Sofea provides test planners with a powerful test development workbench to analyze requirements and automatically generate test scenarios. Test planners can incorporate scope and policy driven test strategies into the requirements model (to drive multi-level, risk, impact, regression testing). 3) After establishing a baseline, Sofea’s powerful integration capability is used to extract formal artifacts such as requirements and tests into leading Requirements Management, Design and Test Execution platforms. The resulting impact is that test planning is completed early in the development project and all tests are 100% traceable to high-quality validated requirements.

Caliber-RM from Borland

is a well-known requirements management tool. It is intended for large and complex systems, and provides a database of requirements with traceability. The company views requirements as part of the software quality management process, which it considers also includes testing and defect tracking. Caliber is Internet-based, and it handles document references, user responsibility, traceability, status and priority.

Chip Carey of Starbase (former owners of Caliber) wrote:
"The exciting thing about RM and Caliber RM in particular is that it brings all departments together within the software development lifecycle and puts them all on the same page - it provides a mechanism for communication and collaboration and effectively provides a synergy where before they were perhaps separate efforts and maybe counter-productive."

C.A.R.E. from Sophist Group

is a Lotus Notes-based tool which provides a database-like view of requirements. The website is in German but the tool's GUI is in English. Using the hypertext-like Lotus Notes is an interesting approach to organizing requirements with obvious practical advantages, and the Sophist Group is noted for its Object-Oriented thinking. The tool provides a wide range of features and produces both textual and graphical outputs.

Comply Pro from Comply Serve

Comply Pro is a web-based service for highly-regulated industries, including transportation, civil engineering and construction. It provides visibility of compliance with requirements down a complete supply chain, with change impact analysis, what-if? analysis, risk analysis, and support for the project assurance or safety case. This appears to be part of a trend (cf Aligned Elements) towards niche specialisation in a market where the major RM tools have reached all the large players in industries which are familiar with systems engineering concepts. The niche players are adapting the language, user interface, and means of provision of traceability tools to support cultures that are not necessarily enthusiastic about computers, let alone the terminology of 'requirements engineering'.

Contour from Jama Software

Contour "connects the entire project team to requirements regardless [of] location using an intuitive Web 2.0 interface. Contour enables the team to see impact before making changes, who’s working on related items and how current tasks relate to project deliverables. Contour runs on all major platforms and is built on open standards for seamless integration."

Cradle from 3SL

Cradle is a multi-user, multi-project, distributed and web-enabled requirements management and systems engineering environment. It is intended for all sizes of requirements and systems development projects. Cradle can link to corporate PDM/EDM systems. It offers configuration management, edit histories and version control. It automates document production and can manage the generated documents. Through its web interface, it can integrate disparate stakeholder groups by creating customisable read-write portals to all project data.

Mark Walker of 3SL writes:
Cradle can deliver unlimited requirements and systems modelling scalability to the desktop through web and non-web methods that allow capture and parsing of requirements and their traceability through every part of all C4ISR, ISO, DoD and INCOSE recommended processes.

Clear Requirements Workbench (CRW) from LiveSpecs Software

helps specify, verify, and manage detailed requirements. CRW supports four detailed specification techniques (glossaries, action contracts, test procedures, and precise use cases) for the clear description of definitions, behaviour, and usage. CRW is under development, with completion expected in Q2 of '04.

David Gelperin of LiveSpecs Software writes:
Clear Requirements Workbench is the first system to actively support the detailed requirements that put customers, users, managers, marketers, developers, testers, and technical writers on the same page.

DESIRe from HOOD Group

is a tool for checking requirements. It is a free add-on to DOORS.  A version for Microsoft Word is being planned.
Currently (2007) the website is in German but you shouldn't have too much trouble finding the "Downloadbereich".

DocuBurst from Teledyne Brown Engineering

is a package that discovers requirements and headings in text documents, and structures them into objects for use in requirements and other tools. It runs on Windows, and generates XML, TSV, CSV, and other file types. It is compatible with most tools including TBE's own XTie-RT.

Sherry Adlich writes:
Using DocuBurst to 'burst' a text document into pieces eliminates days of effort typically spent to analyze documents for information gathering or requirements gathering.

DOORS from Telelogic (which is under offer from IBM)

DOORS is a tool primarily for large organisations which need to control complex sets of user and system requirements with full traceability. It provides good visualisation of such documents as hierarchies, and its extension language enables a wide range of supporting tools to be built, and many are provided as menu commands and examples. Further options include DoorsNet which allows controlled interaction over the Internet, and the Change Proposal System which automates the requirement review cycle. There are live interfaces to many CASE tools, and the promise of tight integration with Telelogic's market-leading Tau toolkit for specification, design, and testing based on UML and the SDT approach to real-time systems development centred on telecommunications. Its use is therefore moving towards integrated project support. The web-based Focal Point is also in the Telelogic stable.

Nancy Rundlet of Telelogic says:
With DOORS, we provide worldwide support, Word-like ease of use, scalability from 1 user to several hundred, and ease of establishing traceability and displaying it to multiple levels.

FeaturePlan

FeaturePlan is a "requirements gathering, analysis and definition" tool (what used to be called Requirements Elicitation or Capture, and which is now more trendily named Discovery or Creation) intended for Product Managers. Since these early tasks are barely covered by most Requirements Management tools (which focus on supporting traceability, documentation, and configuration management), FeaturePlan's claim that it works alongside the likes of Caliber RM, RequisitePro and DOORS is very plausible. It provides a simple table for basic market requirements, and supports this with traceability (ah well, perhaps it's really an RM tool too) and numerous predefined reports. The idea of giving 'customers' direct access to FeaturePlan's web forms is engaging, however.

 

Focal Point (now owned by Telelogic)

is a market-driven requirements management tool. It incorporates customer collaboration, prioritization, visualization, decision-making and planning processes inside a tailorable web-based platform. It links requirements to market segmentation, competitor analysis, release planning and other processes in product life cycle management.

Gatherspace

is a free requirements management and use case development tool that offers multi-user and team functionality. The system is an online solution with different user-tiered packages. There are a variety of reports from basic functionality reports to use case models.

Darren Levy writes:
1) Gatherspace is totally online, no software to download
2) Designed and coded by analysts and project managers who full understand the process of gathering requirements
3) With an intuitive GUI, Gatherspace also provides a to do list of "what's next" to create in addition to defining analyst based terms.

GMARC from Computer System Architects

GMARC was one of the earliest RE methods (conceived 1982) and has been continuously developed ever since. Its development was sponsored by the UK's DTI in 1990 together with the CAA, the MoD, NERC, City University and Kings College London. GMARC is claimed to be unique in its ability to reduce project/programme risk. GMARC enables users to animate / simulate requirements.

Brian Hunt of CSA writes:
GMARC was initially developed to be able to accumulate multi-layer generic requirements knowledge for subsequent re-use, via automated elicitation, in any application domain. The latest version is able to use such knowledge to progressively improve its ability to understand the semantics of, and capture new requirements in, each domain. To aid the process of understanding an application, GMARC provides a suite of powerful requirements animation facilities. These are able to be used to verify and explore the functional aspects of any specification. In order to take subjectivity out of the process (a universal problem!), GMARC employs a multitude of objective quality metrics to guide requirements development activity.

iRise from iRise.com

is a tool for previewing or prototyping a software application before doing any coding. In the process, the requirements are "completely and unambiguously fleshed out - including application and page flows, user interfaces, business logic, data structures and other requirements."

IRQA from VISURE

IRQA is a  tool specifically designed to support the complete RE process. In IRQA the complete specification cycle including requirements capture, analysis, system specification, validation and requirement organisation is supported via standard models.

Antonio Monzón, then of TCP Sistemas e Ingeniería, wrote:
"with IRQA, we cover the full requirements specification cycle, not only RM and capture but also analysis, specification - features related to the construction of a specification; we have graphical, visual features like State Machines, Use Cases, graphical structuring of specifications - functional, non-functional, test cases, diagrams of review processes, information models, link matrices."

Jalsoft from Jalsoft

is a web-based RM tool. The tool contains a database (DB2, Oracle or SQL/Server) and an ordinary web server at the server end; the thin client is simply a web browser, so installation is trivial and learning is said to be a matter of minutes. The tool integrates with Word, MS Office and MS Project; there is an XMI interface to other tools, and CSV file import and export. The tool can therefore be used 'from anywhere in the world'. RM functions like traceability, history, baselining and reporting are provided.

Leap SE from Leap Systems

Leap SE is a requirements engineering CASE tool that produces object-oriented models directly from a system requirements repository or specification (SRS). A 30-day trial version is available.

Brian Smith of Leap Systems writes:
By translating English into logical models for software development, Leap SE achieves RAD from the source, dramatically shortening the systems analysis phase for software projects.

LEXIOR from Cortim

is a service for reviewing requirements, involving both automated checks and "native English speaking reviewers". Turnaround is promised within 48 hours. Output is in the form of review reports including European Space Agency-style "Review Item Discrepancies" (RID forms). Services are provided to (for example) the automotive and aerospace sectors.

MKS Integrity for Requirements Management from MKS

MKS Integrity for Requirements Management is a 'right-weight' RM tool. It is built as an integral part of a wider project support system, which uses workflow to take requirements through to design, step by step "within a highly flexible authoring and approval environment". It integrates with Microsoft Word, organises requirements hierarchically with rich text and "an intuitive document centric view", provides history, baselining, metrics, traceability to source code, suspect links, etc. Low cost of ownership is claimed.

David Martin of MKS writes:
"the clear connection between requirements, development activity and development artefacts delivers an unprecedented level of auditability, something every IT organization must demonstrate for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance."

MockupScreens from Igor Jese

MockupScreens is a rapid User Interface prototyping tool. You create screen mockups and organise them into scenarios, complete with buttons, fields, lists etc. Free evaluation copy from website.

Objectiver from Cediti

Cediti is a spin-off from the University of Louvain, Belgium (UCL), and the tool is based on the KAOS method of analysing goals devised by Prof. Axel van Lamsweerde. The tool thus has a solid foundation (capable of formal proof) for modelling goals, requirements, agents, entities, events relationships, actions, etc, with all the relationships between them (cause-effect, conflict, instance-of, goal refinement, etc), supported by editable diagrams.

Nicolas Ducourthial of Cediti writes:
Key advantages of Objectiver are:

• it enables analysts to elicit and specify requirements in a systematic way,
• it produces well structured, self-contained, motivated, easily understandable, standard requirements documents,
• it provides highly effective way to communicate about the requirements,
• it ensures traceability from requirements to goals and from high-level, coarse-grained behavioural specifications to requirements.

OPEN Process Framework (OPF) from Firesmith Consulting

This remarkable toolkit contains a repository of reusable process components for building project-specific processes for software-intensive systems - complete, hook, line and sinker. There are numerous reusable process components including work products (from requirements, diagrams, models, documents to components), work units (activities, tasks, and techniques), producers (roles, teams, organizations), enterprises (projects, programs, enterprises), and stages (development cycles, phases, milestones). Requirements are supported in detail including document content and format standards, templates, inspection checklists, and guidelines.

OptimalTrace (formerly SteelTrace, before that Catalyze) from Compuware

OptimalTrace takes a structured view of requirements, breaking them into Functional (in the form of a Use Case-like storyboard structure of main flow, alternative flows etc.) and non-functional requirements (qualities and constraints). These map seamlessly to functional test cases, UML activity diagrams, requirements based milestones in project plans etc. Ease of use is emphasized.

Tadhg O'Brien writes:
"SteelTrace lets everyone work together easily to define, communicate and understand project requirements so that business, development, and test deliver quality software faster. Reduce over-runs, re-work and time to delivery. Maximise project quality and RoI." 

Pace from ViewSet Corporation

Pace is a web-based requirements management tool; no client installation is needed beyond having a web browser for basic tasks. Client components have to be installed for specific tasks like information modelling and interfacing to Microsoft Word. The data are held centrally in Oracle or any other relational DBMS. Pace supports Windows, Linux and Unix. The product is designed to be scalable and cross-discipline. It provides a process definition tool to enable requirements administrators to configure the system to their organisation's processes. Administrators can define their own folders to organize documents arbitrarily. Pace provides a "full" document management system, enabling eg source documents and standards to be stored and retrieved from the web-based user interface. These can be linked to (though at what level - document, section, paragraph, etc - is not clear). Collaboration is supported with discussion threads, a change control process, and automatic alerts to users on monitored events (eg a specific object is modified).

QuARS from the SEI

The Quality Analyzer for Requirements Specifications is a tool for checking requirements in natural language, produced by the SEI. It is documented on their website as a research project but it isn't immediately obvious how to get hold of it. If you manage to obtain it, please let me know how you did that and I'll post details here.

Rally from Rally Software Development

Rally (formerly Projectricity) is a requirements management tool integrated with a set of web-based tools to manage the entire project lifecycle. The toolkit contains specialised tools with dedicated on-screen forms to manage change requests, issues, defects, test plans/results, tasks, schedules, risks, documents and more. Rally formerly made software specifically for Agile software development.

RaQuest from SparxSystems Japan

This is an add-on tool for managing a list or tree of requirements with SparxSystems' UML modelling tool Enterprise Architect. It has been developed and marketed by SparxSystems' sister organisation in Japan.

SparxSystems Japan writes:
"RaQuest is not dependent on any specific methodology for requirement management. We aim for RaQuest to be used for the processing and management of any requirements.
Moreover, the greatest feature of RaQuest at present is being closely coordinated with Enterprise Architect which is an UML modeling tool. This will enable you to refer to requirements from within Enterprise Architect, and to maintain a relationship between UML elements and requirements."

Raven from Ravenflow

The "Requirements Authoring and Validation ENvironment" (RAVEN) is apparently the first commercial tool meant specifically to help find errors in requirements text. It works by translating use case text into UML activity (ie flowchart) and responsibility diagrams, where with luck any errors will be spotted by "requirements writers" or "business leaders". A requirements export integration to RequisitePro is provided.

"RAVEN automatically creates activity and responsibility diagrams from plain business English text so you get immediate visual feedback on your use cases.
Once you see the errors, you can transform the unstructured English into "requirements English" that specifies the use case clearly, consistently, and completely. RAVEN helps you become a better requirements writer."

RDT from IgaTech Systems

RDT is a relatively simple tool from an Australian company. It is based on Microsoft Office, but with numerous custom forms (pop-up windows) for entering settings, attributes, etc, and for displaying results. Thought has been given to getting requirements in from ordinary Word documents, and to producing documents as reports by filtering, selecting attributes, and formatting. This seems to make it intermediate between 'light' products like RequireIT and Requisite Pro, and 'full' products like DOORS and RDD. 'Capture' is interpreted simply as 'import and extraction'. The tool wisely encourages users to record design rationale.

Gordon Brimble of IgaTech writes:
RDT provides highly capable document handling for parsing input documents and creating output documents, capture of derivations that link derived requirements to record the logic behind requirement flowdown and integration with requirements modelling tools.

Reconcile from Compuware (see also OptimalTrace)

This is one of a suite of tools focussed on quality assurance and change management.

RequirementsAssistant from Sunny Hills Consultancy BV

is a tool for checking and reviewing requirements.

Reqtify from TNI-Valiosys

This is one of a suite of tools designed to assist the development of mission- and safety-critical software (in C, C++, Ada) for aerospace, defence, and industry.

Reqtify is a low-cost traceability & impact analysis tool. It is said to take just 1/2 a day to learn. It interfaces to Word and other word processing tools, the other TNI-Valiosys modelling tools, Simulink, etc. It has been applied on Airbus A380 computer projects (alongside RTM) with thousands of requirements and links. Interestingly, the tool is document-centric: requirements are tagged by the user in the source documents; the tool searches for these tags each time a source document is saved, and makes a snapshot of the requirements so discovered.

Lionel BURGAUD of TNI-Valiosys writes:
For project and quality engineers who need to track requirements across the development cycle, Reqtify is a low-cost, highly customizable and easy to use tool that manages requirements traceabitity, impact analysis, filtering and versioning. Unlike other database tools, Reqtify processes information directly extracted from the source files (text processing, Excel, PDF, UML, analysis & modelling, code, etc.) without requiring any modifications, and therefore can be very quickly deployed even on projects already started.

Requisite Pro from IBM Rational

Requisite Pro aims especially at managing change in requirements, with traceability for software and test specifications. It is closely linked to Microsoft Word, and Rational is a Microsoft Development Partner. The tool permits the use of Oracle on Unix or Windows as the back-end database, and also supports SQL server on Windows. Rational merged with IBM (in 2003) which might mean many things, such as a greater focus on research and consultancy, perhaps.

Jim Heumann of IBM Rational writes:
Rational is about tools but also about services, lots of teams locally that serve people, best practices and thought leadership, and of course our goal is to help people write better software - in a nutshell.

RETH, a freeware prototype owned by Siemens, created by Dr. Hermann Kaindl

RETH (Requirements Engineering Through Hypertext) is a simple RM tool that demonstrates some powerful aspects of RE. It constructs a set of goals, scenarios, and requirements, each fully-documented with built-in and custom attributes, and inter-connected with hyperlinks. Models can be exported to documents and to HTML.

Rhapsody from Telelogic (formerly I-Logix)

Rhapsody is an Object-Oriented Analysis and Design tool for embedded software. The emphasis is rather on design, with analysis using UML to describe objects for subsequent detailed design and code generation. Presumably we can expect to see a range of integrations between Doors, Rhapsody, and other products, helping to bridge the gap between textual requirements and model-based design and testing.

RQA (Requirements Quality Analyzer) from The REUSE Company

is a checking tool that carries out lexical and syntactic analysis of requirements, providing warnings of errors. Integrations are available for Doors and IRqA.

ScenarioPlus

ScenarioPlus for Use Cases is a set of free add-on tools for use with Doors. It installs as a menu on the Doors menubar, and provides for editing and analysing a set of UML-style use cases. Metrics and checklists are provided. There is a strong emphasis on requirements elicitation with easily-understood graphics, generated automatically. The toolset is closely integrated with Doors allowing for complete flexibility in filtering, traceability and reporting.

The site also offers a suite of Microsoft Office templates for scenario-based requirements engineering; tools for editing a range of software engineering diagrams, and tools for functions such as filtering and constructing Doors templates.

Ian Alexander writes:
my aim with Scenario Plus is to improve the engineering of systems (not just software) by encouraging the use of state-of-the-art techniques for requirements elicitation, specification, and validation, including means such as scenarios, graphics, metrics, and templates.

SAT from CassBeth

The Specification Analysis Tool analyses and checks requirements automatically but "allows humans to make final decisions at each level". It looks for "complex specification problems such as missing capabilities" and gathers metrics. SAT is one of a range of natural language analyzers from CassBeth including tools to check Legislation, Medical Transcripts, Plain Language (for government use) and Contracts.

 

Free Prototype Educational Tools for Systems and Software Engineering from SEEC

The Systems Engineering & Evaluation Centre at the University of South Australia (UniSA) offers a suite of free tools that "can be used in the classroom and in the workplace". The tools include the fancifully-named TIGER, ACE, ET, CARP and RAT (ahem. I recall the immortal line from another project back in 1991 "RAT tool is mouse-driven"). These stand for:

• Tool to InGest and Elucidate Requirements (TIGER), ie free text extraction with keywords
• Acceptance Criteria Elucidator (ACE), ie editing the criteria in a database
• Requirement Enhancing documentation Tool (ET), ie attribute editing
• Comparison Analysis of Requirements Priority (CARP), ie prioritisation
• Risk documentation And profiling Tool (RAT), ie risk attribute editing.

It can be seen that these form a single basic RM environment. They have "a similar user interface". The tools and website are being steadily improved (2004 to 2006 ... ).

Simunicator from Borland (formerly Simunication)

is a web-based tool for prototyping and simulating software applications. The resulting early feedback from customers enables the requirements to be improved at the right moment.

Richard Khan of Simunication writes:
"Simunicator enables anyone with a web browser to connect, build and distribute online prototypes/simulations so everyone can test drive and validate the application before project signoff.
   Simunicator prototypes/simulations are driven from use cases injected with industry standard user interface and behavior that is later reusable in development. Simunicator is the only simulation tool available for simulating complex AJAX, SOA, DHTML/DOM, Java Script and HTML applications.
   Customer sign off can be obtained more quickly and correct requirements can be sent to production. With Simunicator, projects hit the ground running with development, testing, documentation and training departments all in sync. from the start."

Smartcheck from Smartware Technologies

is a tool for checking requirements. It "locates ambiguities within requirement or technical specifications based upon a word, word category, or complexity level."

SpeeDEV from Kovair

This product takes the approach that requirements in a distributed project need to be developed on the Web. It is claimed to be suitable for hardware as well as software, and covers requirements gathering, "scrubbing", approving, prioritizing, assigning to version releases, task management, testing, bug tracking and other functions. This sounds as if the toolkit will suit some kinds of project very well, but might prove restrictive if the way the tasks are supported isn't what your project wants. The Web is clearly the way more tools will go, so expect hot competition in this area.

Irene From of SpeeDEV writes:
SpeeDEV operates in a completely Web-based environment to promote the free exchange of information and project team participation. SpeeDEV's solution is the only commercial browser-based solution for local or remote software development collaboration, available as enterprise software.

Statestep from Statestep

is a free specification tool based on a state model. The user interface allows required behaviour to be defined in decision tables. The tool helps to check systematically that all unusual cases are considered. The resulting model is a finite state machine, which can be checked automatically for completeness and consistency, e.g. that no undesirable state is reachable. The tool has been used commercially to specify consumer electronic systems.

Michael Breen writes:
"As a relatively specialized tool based on creating a model of behaviour, it's a bit different to most of the tools in your list...
Anyway, one sentence could be:
'Among other things, Statestep features a unique colour-based interface which makes it feasible to deal systematically with (for example) millions of possibilities - and so to find obscure problem cases otherwise likely to be overlooked in a specification.' "

SteelTrace: see OptimalTrace
 

Teamcenter from Siemens

includes a requirements tool (formerly Slate): "Industrial Strength Groupware for managing requirements, architecting systems, and accelerating product development". Tools cover design and testing as well as requirements. The examples on the website include radar and aircraft carrier, so there is a perceptible military-industrial orientation. The tool provides for conventional box-and-arrow diagrams, but also allows document and object hierarchies, and arbitrary traceability linking. An interesting feature is a budget which provides a recursively added hierarchical spreadsheet for each attribute ('technical allocatable' in Slate jargon) which is to be budgeted. Slate is apparently genuinely object-oriented and as such should suit large industrial projects that want to use OO analysis and design. Some systems engineers see Slate as a tool that mainly supports the life-cycle after the requirements phases. It provides limited support for requirements capture.

Harold Knight of SDRC (an earlier owner of Slate): Slate is fundamentally different in Systems Engineering because we manage all components of the design in true Object-Oriented fashion - not documents or paper but information, so we are a system design tool - system engineers can design and view systems from any perspective.

TEKchecker is one of the tools from Livespecs. It helps to validate requirements written in Microsoft Word for Windows. It must be used with Livespecs' StyleWriter (a Plain English editor), also for Word. It looks for problems such as ambiguity, insufficiency, redundancy and vagueness. It analyzes grammatical structures such as adjectives, imperatives, negation, measures, nouns, verbs and quantifiers.

Tiger Pro is one of the free SEEC tools.

 

TopTeam Analyst from Technosolutions

is a commercial multi-user requirements management tool. It supports use cases, traceability, screen prototypes, documents, issue tracking, and change proposals.

The Volere Template from The Atlantic Systems Guild

The Volere Template is a comprehensive list of all the components that the Robertsons recommend should go into a requirements specification. It is closely associated with the Volere method described in their book, but contains many useful suggestions that could enhance any requirements method. The template can be used with any general RE tool or simply with word-processed documents.

WIBNI from Project Toolbox

(Wouldn't It Be Nice If ...?) is a very low cost RM tool based on Microsoft Access, (like Requisite Pro and DoorsRequireIT). It records priority, status, type, and other attributes, documents links between requirements, keeps an audit trail, exports to Word, and enables sorting and filtering like much heavier tools. Interestingly it also supports event-driven and use-case analysis. There is a free evaluation version.

John Richards of Project Toolbox writes:
"I've been managing projects for many years and could not find a requirements database I wanted to use at a price I could justify. I knew what I wanted though, so in the end I developed it."

XTie-RT from Teledyne Brown Engineering (TBE)

TBE released XTie-RT commercially in July 1996. The tool was initially developed for in-house use to assist with proposal development, regulation compliance on environmental programs and large complex systems for the US Army and NASA. It encourages users to document the reasons for decisions.
Users are equally divided between Government contractors and Commercial industry, and between hardware and software. The tool is claimed to be simple to learn, robust and full featured. TBE consider Doors their primary competitor.

Invitation to Readers

I am always interested to hear about any requirements management tools, templates and sites not mentioned here, and about links that are now broken as tools and companies are renamed or reorganized.

Invitation to Vendors

Text will be edited for neutrality. Quotes may be edited for length.

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