I'm a software developer in a growing SaaS Human Capital Management provider (Agile) and we only use Team Foundation Server (TFS) to keep track of our backlog, stories, acceptance criteria, work order management, etc.
Requirements for stories are documented as acceptance criteria in TFS but highly unstructured. It is very hard to quickly find how things should behave without having to dive into Work Items or even into code.
In my previous job we used Rational Doors software as a requirement repository and it did the job but people didn't like it because it was slow and maybe too complex.
In my opinion, it's hard to become agile when your level of business complexity grows exponentially and you don't have a quick way to get answers. Besides that, where i'm at we tend to shy away from writing extensive documentation which will rarely be read, and even searching through documents is not very efficient.
Options I see:
- Using our Intranet
- Using office/TFS integrations
- Using a Business Rule Management System
- Using a software for requirements like IBM Doors.
Among the features I think would be needed:
- To be fast for searches and entries by all stakeholders like developers, business analysts, domain knowledge experts, etc (structured data)
- Hierarchical nature (promoting/demoting items)
- Linkage between areas and functional requirements
- If possible integrated to TFS
Any other recommendations?
Thanks,