Advocates of agile software development recognize that requirements evolve from their inception to their realization in working software. MKS Requirements 2005 supports requirements changes through suspect links. Suspect links are flags on relationship fields that are triggered when a requirement is changed. This allows dependent features, tasks, and tests to be marked as needing to be reviewed for the impact of a requirements change.

Finally, MKS Requirements 2005 allows team members to view the status of project using a project management dashboard. The dashboard is a real-time view of project data that provides for interactive drill down to details. Figure 3 shows a project management dashboard with project status graphs and links to reports and queries.

Summary: Advantages of an Integrated Requirements Management Solution
The manner in which MKS integrated requirements management capabilities into MKS Integrity Manager demonstrates the flexibility and extensibility of this process modeling and workflow management tool. Requirements, features, and tasks are managed like any other issue (i.e., process item) stored in the MKS Integrity Manager database. One clear benefit of building requirements management artifacts from issues is that the artifacts can be linked to affected source code files using change packages. No integration effort is required to facilitate traceability of requirements and change management from the same repository.

While the requirements management components, workflows, and process rules described in the product documentation may appear to represent a rigid model, a closer look at the process template shows otherwise. The MKS Integrity Manager documentation contains detailed, but easy to follow instructions for extending any MKS Integrity Manager component, including the issues in the process template. By following these instructions, the components in the process template can be tailored, in a straightforward manner, using the MKS Integrity Manager GUI.

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MKS
410 Albert Street
Waterloo, ON
N2L 3V3 Canada
Phone: 800 265-2797
Fax: 519 884-8861
Web: www.mks.com

Test Platform
Dell Inspirion 8100, 1.2GHz Intel Pentium III mobile, 512MB RAM, 40GB disk, Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2

Specifications Platforms
Server and Client: Windows NT/2000/XP, Unix, Linux
Pricing: Pricing for 10 users of the MKS Integrity Suite (including MKS Source Integrity Enterprise, MKS Integrity Manager, MKS Integrity Server and MKS Requirements) is $37,000

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JDJ Product Snapshot

Target Audience: All members of the software development team including software configuration managers, developers, business analysts, and project managers.
Level: All levels, from beginner to expert.
Pros:

• No integration required. MKS Requirements 2005 is a complete and self-contained requirements management solution because it's built with the process modeling and workflow management tool MKS Integrity Manager. Contrast the approach followed by MKS to the model used by other tool vendors. Other requirements management products must be integrated with a software configuration management tool to provide traceability from requirements to source code.
• Facilitates requirements based development. Relationships coupled with change packages link requirements to the source code files that implement them. This also provides the traceability needed for audits, including software baseline audits.

• First generation product. Even though MKS Requirements 2005 is built with the mature MKS Integrity Manager, potential enhancements will be identified as MKS Requirements 2005 is used in production environments.