Kovair Global Lifecycle, an Independent Product Review by Bob Aiello, CM Crossroads Journal

Often the Enterprise IT organizations focus on a single point tool like Requirements Management  to solve many of their woes in Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) practices. Though these point tools may serve critical functions of a mature SDLC practice, they may not be enough to solve all problems and you may need bigger guns to your rescue. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) as a discipline as well as a tool category may be a more suitable than point solutions like Requirements Management.

That is the take away from a recent report by Carey Schwaber and Peter Sterpe of Forrester Research for Application Development & Program Management Professionals, aptly named ‘Selecting The Right Requirements Management Tool — Or Maybe None Whatsoever’.
Some of the reasons a tool like Requirements Management has gained popularity among the Enterprise  IT organizations, the report describes, are:

• Turbulent business conditions have created painful levels of requirements churn
• Compliance requirements have elevated the importance of traceability
• Recognition that defective requirements result in defective applications has increased

However the report also finds that ‘Requirements Management Tools aren’t the Answer to every requirements problem’. Report discusses three types of Requirements Management tools:

• Standalone requirements management tools
•  Single-repository ALM platforms with requirements management on top
• Multirepository ALM platforms that include requirements management

Finally the report advises ‘Although neither type of requirements management solution is ideal at present, requirements management capabilities within ALM solutions have the most potential. Requirements management tools have so much in common with other life-cycle tools that it doesn’t make sense for them to be standalone offerings’.

The report includes Kovair’s solutions both in ‘Standalone requirements management tools’ and ‘Multirepository ALM platforms’ categories. It also finds Kovair Global Lifecycle/ Requirements Management is the only Standalone Requirements Management tool with the full Process capability. However, it details Kovair Global Lifecycle/ Enterprise Edition as the only Multirepository ALM platform among all the tools discussed in the report as described below.

‘Multirepository ALM platforms provide common services to discrete practitioner tools, obviating the need for each practitioner tool to include redundant and inconsistent ALM functionality. The only vendor with a requirements management solution of this sort is Kovair. Kovair Global Lifecycle/ Enterprise Edition functions as an orchestration engine for processes spanning multiple development life-cycle tools, including Kovair’s own requirements management solution.’

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