An essential component of Serena Dimensions 10, Dimensions RM ensures that project teams effectively collect and refine project requirements. Dimensions RM allows enterprises to effectively manage change in requirements during the project lifecycle. Dimensions RM automates requirements management throughout the development lifecycle, making it easy to:
- Gather and logically link associated requirements
- Collaborate on requirements definitions
- Baseline requirements for project milestones
- Understand the impact of requirement changes
- Link requirements to development projects
- Report on requirements definition, baselines, change impact, and traceability
Collaboration
In virtually any enterprise project, requirements come from multiple sources—customer and end user requirements, object-oriented design models from development, test procedures from QA, defects from customer service, change requests from all of the above, and more. Dimensions RM facilitates and organizes these incoming requirements. Once requirements have been captured, Dimensions RM facilitates a shared understanding allowing team members to view, understand, and discuss requirements, submit change requests, and create specific polls querying the user community about the requirements. This information is automatically stored in Dimensions RM so that the rationale behind decisions is preserved.
Familiarity and usability
Managers don’t need to make huge investments in expensive methodology training in order to see the benefits of Dimensions RM. In fact, RM encourages user participation by leveraging familiar desktop tools like Microsoft Word, thereby easing widespread adoption and reducing time to productivity. Users can quickly capture requirements from existing Word documents into the RM environment, or use Word to author new requirements. RM then allows users to simply associate information or attributes with individual requirements such as cost, schedule, or other types of data. This data is automatically captured and stored in RM’s powerful Oracle™ data repository. Dimensions RM also allows users to personalize the way data is presented to them through a customizable forms interface and a customized web menus and home page.
Traceability and impact analysis
Dimensions RM’s architecture enables it to deliver the traceability and visibility organizations need to make sound business decisions. Leveraging its data repository, users can track requirements information across development lifecycles, projects, and even organizations. This traceability gives users the power to answer key questions, like:
- What marketing requirements have no product requirements associated with them?
- What functions in the design are not needed and should be eliminated?
- What software applications and modules need modifications?
- What is the impact of changes?
Flexibility and integration
Dimensions RM supports both formal and informal requirements management processes, allowing users to evolve as their familiarity with the tool grows. RM can scale from small to very large projects, letting organizations standardize on a single product. The inherent flexibility of Dimensions RM is shown in our customers’ use of the product for everything from managing software projects requirements, mobile phones, and even IT infrastructure changes.
Dimensions RM has a tight integration to Serena Composer, addressing the needs of requirements validation through advanced prototyping and modeling. Visualization of requirements enables teams to gain a shared understanding and vision of the requirements. RM’s integration with TeamTrack delivers end-to-end process management and orchestrates project workflows. Dimensions RM is also tightly integrated with Mercury Quality Center to ensure complete traceability from requirements to test. Handy data import and data export capabilities make it easy to integrate Dimensions RM with many 3rd party tools and existing environments.
Dimensions RM Demo »
