Monday, July 03, 2006

Great tool for documenting software requirements

The problem with documenting IT requirements is that you either reinvent the wheel in the detail you go into, or you leave gaping holes. Either that or the tool is too technical for a business user so they cannot express their needs.

But now we have a tool from STP which cleverly uses MS Visio, Excel and Word to help formally capture requirements in a structured way. This is no substitute for Unified Modelling Language, but then few true business analysts use UML (it's the domain of the developer analyst).

stpBA Storyboarding allows the user to drag and drop screens, controls and other components in the Visio environment and automatically drafts Functional Requirement documents in Word and Excel. Of course, versioning is all looked after and there are some neat screen grab tricks for where you are starting with a legacy system.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

ClickRich, I have to agree that the tool is great for documenting requirements. We use the tool for specifying almost all of our software changes. The only area where we tend not to use the tool is specifying changes to our non-GUI data feed systems.