Requirements Management and Verification at GSOC - Experience gained and current development

Abstract

A major program at GSOC required the implementation of a requirements management tool. GSOC selected the software package DOORS for that purpose. The positive experience gained in this project, lead to the aim of establishing an in-house standard for requirements management and verification related topics. In order to achieve this goal a number of initiatives have been started:• An internal training program, designed for the special needs of an operations center, was set up to provide regular training sessions. The training is split between a basic DOORS user training and special sessions on specific topics for key personnel (e.g. project structuring)• A generic DOORS structure for an exemplary project was developed. This contains templates for all relevant documents and elements. The structure shall be used by all projects as basis for project-specific customization.• A GSOC standard set of templates was generated to create office documents from DOORS data by using Rational Publishing Engine (e.g. requirements specification, test specification, test report).• A basic set of DOORS extensions (DXL scripts) is provided to all users. The user gets a set of additional functions (e.g. enhanced import / export, configurable data analysis) without the necessity to develop own scripts.These initiatives increased the project managers' awareness about the benefit of using a standard requirements management approach. They also improved the acceptance of using DOORS among the project staff. Moreover, the initial effort for new projects to implement the requirements management process using DOORS is significantly reduced.