Best approach to tracking use cases, product requirements, and validation tests?

[Paul Matz]

We are looking for knowledgable folks to advise and/or help us set up either Confluence, Jira or both, to track product requirements and whether they've been validated. We have multiple products that share both use cases & requirements, and would like to leverage this commonality.

There are 3 main things we want to be able to do;

1. Define & track use cases, requirements, and verification tests and then the relationship between them, i.e. a use case will have N number of derived reqs. Then for each of those reqs, there will be a test to verify; Could be 1 test verifies multiple reqs. So, in effect, need to be able to forward or back link one to many...
2. For that structure, associate a product type (7, 8, 9, ...) and a release (which will be a combo of hardware version, OS version, and perhaps even App(s) versions).
3. For these entities, need versioning of each separately, and a way to capture a configuration of them for release snapshot, and then for starting the next release.

The user stories feature might be a good way to capture user experiences / use cases. Where it describes Trace requirements to JIRA issues, this seems like maybe a way to trace requirements to Tests, if there's a way to create a thing called at "Test" as opposed to an "Issue".

Online docs mention is is possible to Customize the Product Requirements Blueprint, which would be a good thing to look into right in the beginning. If we could get some help setting it up right, that would be great.

Thanks.

-PEM

[EPS Software Engineering AG]

Hi Paul,

There are three ways to connect pages in Confluence.

1. Parent Child Relation

2. Hyper Links

3. Labels and then use macros, like Content by Label, Content Report Table, Page Properties Report.

So you have to build your needed structure based on this elements.

Because Templates are limited to one Confluence page and Blueprints require JAVA Programming, we interduced the Page Tree Creator. With this Add-on you are able to build page trees, add buttons to create the page trees and add Labels to the top pages. I think, it could help you a lot for building up your structures.

Check it out under LIVE EXAMPLES (no registration needed).

Regards,
Stephan

[Paul Matz]

Stephan,

Thank you for the detailed response! We'll study up on your suggestions. It sounds like there are a number of options to build relationship between entities. 

So, let's say we have a collection of a few hundred pages of three types (use case, requirement, and test), which have connections built with methods you suggest. Would the relationships be stored within the page objects themselves? Why I ask is because we want to capture different collections of these objects based on product and release. So, it would be better if there was a way to track relationships, and also state of the object, separately.

For example, say there are three products in different stages of definition & development. They will share many of the use cases, requirements, and validation tests, but those may be in different stages of approval (use cases), definition (requirements), and validation (tests). And, then as each product is released and sustained, these collections will need to be modified to reflect changes, while we will want a static record of each release milestone captured for the record.

It would seem other folks would have thought of this, and so we are just hoping someone out there can point us to a reference or step up and propose a set of templates & customizations that would allow this. Any suggestions on who at Atlassian we could talk to about this would be appreciated.

Thanks again.

[EPS Software Engineering AG]

Paul,

Yes the labels and links would be stored on/in the page. But if you have a shared use case, it would have different labels that pull the page into the appropriate reports. So if for example a use case has to be modified by one product, you would have to copy it first and then start working on it. And of course set the labels accordingly.

The label-feature makes Confluence a very powerful tool and you can build matrixes like in a document management tool.

It's a bit of work, but from my point of view, you should give it a try. Maybe there is a Solution Partner close to your area and they could help you setting it up.

Regards,
Stephan

[Paul Matz]

Thanks. We have been trying to contact our local Sales rep, but maybe you know of a list of Solution Partners by locale?