ReqPro - a great tool for requirements management in the enterprise
Updated September 21, 2018
ReqPro - a great tool for requirements management in the enterprise
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Rational RequisitePro
IBM Rational RequisitePro is leveraged as the Requirements Repository as well as the sole source for tracking User Stories and related Artifacts. Business Partners enter the user stories into the system, and then the are cataloged and go through our Agile Sprints and track through Quality Assurance. This allows everyone to have a real time view of requirements and how items are moving to production.
Pros
- Flexibility to customize the repository to meet the needs of your process and business unity
- Compatibility with Microsoft Office tools
- Flexible reporting capability to extract data and report in Excel
- Ability to tie requirements and break them do to trace requirements to implementation
Cons
- Performance can be an issue. Make certain the server is sized properly
- There is a large difference in capability of the Thick Client Version compared with the web based version. Make certain each job function has proper access to be able to do what is required of them.
- Learning curve is not too steep, but would suggest having someone with experience setup the repository. Highly suggest getting a contractor to assist to get the repository up and running.
- Allowed our team to create a library of requirements available to the larger organization
- Consolidated reporting and creates a transparent view status information
- Supported moving from Waterfall to Agile Software Development Methodology
- JIRA Software and CA Agile Central (formerly Rally)
RequisitePro integrated better with our tech stack, and allowed us to leverage our process. Many products that are available focus in on using their internal processes or required fields/data rather than allowing the flexibility and business defined processes. Keep in mind that if the process that is part of the product will meet your needs, then I would not discount the product.
Using IBM Rational RequisitePro
25 - Business Analysts, Systems Analysts, Product Owners. It is used in our agile process to manage use cases and user stories to aid in flowing of work to our scrum teams for software development. Testing teams also use the data to build test cases and end to end functional scripts. No work is done without it first coming through ReqPro.
3 - It is a small team to build out workflows and to manage data setup and requests. As our requirements workflow is modified, we directly update Reqpro to support the needs of the team. It is important to have a knowledge of the RDBMS you employ for requirements as well as reqpro.
- Requirements Management
- Project Prioritization
- Commmunication
- Build out of documents for audit
- Tracking of Team Velocity
- Understanding Dependencies
- Document Management - Requirements
- Further Reporting
- Build out of details for audit requirements - data extraction
Evaluating IBM Rational RequisitePro and Competitors
Yes - It replaced Word Documents/Excel sheets used to manage requirements. The big push was to get us to a place where we could interrogate requirements and have transparency to see them across multiple teams. It also allows reporting to show where a piece of work is in the pipeline, and who is managing it.
- Product Features
- Product Reputation
- Existing Relationship with the Vendor
The tool was a great tool for the money, but did have the need to purchase one license per person. Floating licenses are available, but the functionality is less for the web version. Having this tool integrate with other IBM tools is very convenient and does provide a productivity lift for the team.
Look at how the tool fits in the enterprise and the number of people using it. Make sure your process fits within the tool rather than making the tool fit your process. Overall it is a good tool and does the job, but make sure you have a set in process before moving forward with it.
IBM Rational RequisitePro Implementation
- Implemented in-house
- Third-party professional services
We used a COE in house plus external services.
Change management was a major issue with the implementation - We were moving to agile development and needed a means to track use cases and user stories from start to finish.
- Understanding how to implement our process in the application
- Mapping of fields between the MS Office and IBM ReqPro DB
- Working through Performance issues.
IBM Rational RequisitePro Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Yes
Since our company has a large suite of IBM tools, the full support was purchased for this one as well as part of our ELA. It is a good thing to do, as it is very handy during upgrades it is quick to reach out and get the needed information to support the software.
Yes - Yes. We were able to use our IBM ID and login to the support site. Question was acknowledged immediately and answered within 3 business days. Information given was direct and pertinent to our issue and they had a tech call us to walk through the remediation of the issue that we had identified during our conversion to a new hardware platform.
We were moving to a new hardware platform and noticed that some of our functions were not working properly. IBM assisted looking through some of our own code and changes to resolve an issue. It ended up that a newer person on the team had hard coded a value and caused the issue.
Using IBM Rational RequisitePro
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Well integrated Quick to learn Feel confident using | Requires technical support Lots to learn |
- Integration with MS Office
- Screen Building Capabilities
- Report Exports
- Easy to design complicated screens
- Reporting from the RDBMS was a challenge
- Due to performance issues had to extract data to excel to make it widely available.
Yes - Though it was available, licensing was an issue and it did not have all the capabilities of the thick client application. It made it so more could access it, but we found it wasn't used as many team members needed the full User interface that was available tin the Client Version.
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