Confluence for Requirements

[Arthur Adams]

I'm evaluating requirements tools for possible purchase, and Confluence is one I'm looking into.

Confluence is one I'm considering. Here are our needs. How does Confluence fit with them?

Identifier

Each requirement must have a unique identifier.

Single Database

Multiple (all?) requirements kept in a single database.

Relationships Between Requirements

Many-to-many relationships between requirements

Requirements Traceability Matrix

Able to generate an RTM, both top-down and bottom-up

Types of Requirements

Supports defining varying classes of requirement (i.e. Enterprise, System, Operational, Interface) with varying fields for each class (i.e. ID, Name, Description, Notes)

Reporting Capability

• Standard Reports (customizable)
• RTM reports
• SQL support (including hierarchical queries)

Workflow

There should be a capability to establish a workflow for generation and approval of requirements.

Baselining

There should be the capability to baseline requirements – for instance, tag a set of requirements as being for a specific release.

Rollback

There should be a capability to roll back requirements.

[Davin Studer]

Based on your description above it sounds more like what you want is JIRA rather than Confluence. Or possibly Jira + Confluence. JIRA is Atlassian project/ticket/issue management system and can do what you are asking above. Confluence is their documentation platform. Since they are both made by Atlassian they work very well together and can actually talk to each other. So, you could create a Confluence page and list your requirements and create JIRA issues for each requirement. The confluence page will have links directly to the JIRA issues (requirements) and as the issues as worked the Confluence page automatically updates to reflect the changes in JIRA.

[Thomas Schlegel]

Yes, as @Davin Studer said, this is definitely a description of Jira. Most of your requirements can be fulfilled with Jira.

[Arthur Adams]

Thanks to you both.

Looks like our customer will be providing us with a Jira installation next week (for certain values of "next week") so I'll be able to explore it.