How do YOU handle requirements?

[Neil Taylor]

Hi Everyone -

I am currently evaluating different products for a testing application for test plans, test cases, etc and many of these applications also provide tracability to requirements that relate to the test case. Some can bring the requirements in via JIRA tickets.

My question is: How do YOU handle requirements? I would like to gather some information to take into account how we do requirements today and evaluate potentially a better method.

Today we log all of our requirements into Confluence pages - for linking to test cases, this can be a pain because the info may be housed in different places (wireframes, business requirements, etc) on the wiki and may be difficult to find within a page because there is so much content -- we thought of adding page anchors, but those seem to be a rather labor intensive procedure especially when you consider we may need 30+ anchors per page. This has sparked the question of, what's the best way to do website requirements.

[Rodrigo Girardi Adami · Accepted solution]

Hi Neil,

I use all confluence functions in order to organize the content as we can see here. I know that as the number of pages and spaces grows, so do the difficulty to maintain organized but if you organize the structure of information well, it will persists organized even if the content grows and this way, better to look for information on the wiki.

It becomes even better if you integrate JIRA and Confluence to merge tickets and pages for single point of information either on the wiki or in the bug tracker.

Cheers,

Rodrigo

[Neil Taylor]

Hi Rodrigo,

Thanks for the response! Could you expand on how this works and what you mean by it: "It becomes even better if you integrate JIRA and Confluence to merge tickets and pages for single point of information either on the wiki or in the bug tracker."

Thanks!!

Neil

[Rodrigo Girardi Adami]

Hi Neil,

You're welcome :)

in the moment you create an application link between confluence and jira, you'll be able to create jira issues links in confluence pages, and when an issue is mentioned, it will also have a link in jira for the confluence page where it was mentioned too. This can be used to organize the content and create link between documents and issues.

I hope this clarifies a bit more. If you need ideas for the content creation in confluence, that link I've sent before may come in hand. :)

Cheers,

Rodrigo

[Ericka Samuels]

other options to use rather than Anchors:

use the Styles in the upper left corner of the tool bar, along with at Table of Contents Macro at the top of the page. anything with a Heading style will be pulled into the Table of Contents.

And, use the Children macro.  Always create a blank container page that lives in the Page Tree, and has nothing on it but a children macro.  I find that helps a lot.

There are not any other easy answers that I know of,

good luck!

[LUC FILION]

Hello Neil, 

There are many ways to handle requirements/subrequirements in JIRA in order to do requirements management. Most of it is manual and requires configuration. You can create issue types which are names Requirements, configure the parameters by integrating custom fields with a subdescription (for instance, requirement type: functional, software, hardware, etc.). All this requires administrative access to create the issue types. Not too complicated.

I invite you anyhow to take a look at our Gaia for JIRA plugin (http://bit.ly/RwwjGQ)- which is intended for software/system process management. From there, you have some sort of a recipe in order to align your development process to the Atlassian tools. You will find in it a Starter Process Template which is a starter for such tasks. We do have at Nuum other templates which includes the creation of Requirement Types automatically, and also include a more formal method for managing them. 

Alternatively, you can take a look at our other plugins which are dedicated to requirement management into JIRA.

I wish you good luck! Please contact me is you have additional questions, 

Regards, 

Luc

[Adrien Ragot 2]

Rather than using Anchors, use Requirement Yogi !

• You can directly link to a requirement within the page, instead of linking to the whole page,
• When you hover over a link, you can see an excerpt of said requirement,
• Requirement Yogi autosuggests the next available requirement key when inserting it, making it easy to annotate existing documents.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of Requirement Yogi.