this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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Hey everyone, I work as a business ans systems analyst and I need to manage a lot of requirements. We are using documents and spreadsheets, but this approach is sooo error prone and time consuming.

I am looking for something that I will use as the sole user, for the moment, as my company has other standards right now. This will help me in making sense of structure and avoid information loss.

My main needs are traceability matrixes for tracing requirements to implementation and test cases, versioning of requirements, tracing of changes in a requirement, analyze impacts of change requests.

I am looking for a tool that supports the following diagramming and modeling frameworks: UML, BPMN, SysML. ArchiMate support might be interesting. It also need to support written requirements and specifications, business rules, objectives.

The current project I am working on extensively uses ontologies, RDF/OWL, and XML. Support for these would also be useful, but not essential. I am mostly interested in the logic of the main requirements tracing processes.

I really liked the ease of use as it was in OSRMT. Unfortunately the software is pretty buggy and unmaintained. ReqView is another very good software for written requirements, but it supports diagramming only as attachment of files, and also is not free and open source :(

So, I tried Modelio, Papyrus, Archi, OSRMT, ReqView. Here's the source I checked the most: https://www.requirementsmanagementtools.com/opensource.php Something like Enterprise Architect from Sparx Systems is cool, but very complex to use.

Apparently, this kind of software is very niche and corporate oriented, so there is just a bunch of free and open source products for this kind of activities.

I am open for any idea! Thank you

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

To be honest, there is a lot of jargon on your post that's alien to me. I don't work with that aspect of industry. Nonetheless... What about the "no SQL" apps? like any foss alternative to airtable. There are plenty. For example, Baserow (built on top of Django). Perhaps you can build python parsers to load data on it, and expose APIs to automatize...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Thank you so much for your suggestions. I wasn't even thinking about something like notion or baserow, so this is definitely a good idea.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Regarding the jargon, I suggest this: https://youtu.be/RIHA53SWO20

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I'm suggesting you invest in reading a book on https://www.LeanPub.com called "Algebra-Driven Design".

the reason I'm suggesting it is that the complex-requirements you're being persecuted-by, are exactly the sort of thing that that book can help with.

( I'm presuming you code )

By creating the domain's algebra, & using meta-programming, you can prevent whole categories of bugs.

I only got part-way into the book ( I'm braindamaged, & have beenfailing to learn programming since the 1980's, when I lost 1/10th of my brain-volume ), but being able to create an APi with ZERO bugs in it, is part of what I'd seen in that book.


I'm a huge believer in keeping requirements divided into dimensions, & keeping those dimensions orthogonal, because once you fail in doing that, you're fscking doomed.

Here: got the link for you:

https://leanpub.com/algebra-driven-design

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