Definition phase

Polarion has several features that you may find useful during the phase when requirements engineers are actually defining requirements, prior to their review and approval/acceptance.

  • Documents — If you prefer a document-centric approach to Requirements, then use Documents to create specification documents and requirement artifacts for tracking and management.

  • Integrated tracker — If you prefer a tool-centric approach you can create requirements artifacts directly in the integrated tracker: Navigation Work Items. Your project should be configured with the Requirement Work Item type, or whatever type corresponds to a requirement in your process and semantics. If you take this approach, we recommend you read the topic Manage Polarion Work Items.

  • Auto-assignment — This feature can save a great deal of work over the life of the project. You can configure Auto-assignment in your projects so that new requirements are automatically assigned to one or more owners. If your process involves parallel work on test cases for verifying requirements, you can configure Auto-assignment for new requirements to include the responsible QA person as an assignee. For information, see Configure Auto-assignment.

  • Linking — You can begin creating traceability even as you define requirements. For example, if you or your QA team develop test cases in parallel with requirements, test cases can be linked to the requirements they verify. Likewise, if requirements you define involve change requests for your development team, you can create those artifacts and link to them to the appropriate requirements so that you have traceability right from the start.

    You can do some linking of requirements within Documents. See Link a Document's Work Items. You can also link Work Items in the tracker (Navigation Work Items), in the Table view or the Matrix view. For more information, see Linking Work Items.