Visure Requirements

Requirements Engineering for Embedded Software Development

The use of embedded software has ballooned as an affordable way to deliver added value features while reducing time-to-market. At the same time product have experienced an increase in the complexity, and now face a number of new challenges.

Visure Requirements

Embedded Software
Requirements Challenges

Benefits

Features

Embedded Software -- Requirements Challenges

Regulatory compliance

Embedded software is becoming an essential part of the systems, and its criticality increases in all sectors as well as the number standards and regulations required. The need to be compliant to these regulations has significantly increased the amount of effort spent in the projects, as companies need to create and keep up-to-date a vast amount of evidence, which has been performed manually in too many occasions. The increase in manual effort in the projects has crippled company profits.

Software risk

The cost of correcting errors found in production phase can be from 900 up to 300,000 times more expensive than if the errors had been found in the requirements phase. When most software defects are directly or indirectly related to poor Requirements Engineering practices, notorious product recalls can completely erode company profits and image.

Growing complexity of software

Embedded software has experienced an exponential growth, and so has the complexity of the large-scale systems which normally derive into variants of a product line. Pressure increases to deliver quality products on time and within budget. The amount, critically and complexity of the requirements prevents companies without a mature Requirements Engineering process to consistently produce quality solutions and products on time.

Missing connection to market needs and business Requirements

Despite the increase in software-based features, companies are delivering only a portion of the expected functionality. Shorter release cycles, reduced budgets, obsolete and changing requirements, and the lack of communication cause companies to consistently fail to meet original product goals and new market demands.

Visure Requirements—One tool for the complete Requirements Lifecycle

Visure Requirements is a proven flexible and complete Requirements Engineering tool, capable of streamlining the software requirements process as part of the hardware and mechanical definition process.

Visure Requirements aids effective project collaboration and increases software quality through Requirements Capture, Analysis, Specification, Validation and Verification, Management and Reuse.

Obtaining Further Information

For further information about the LDRA tool suite and availability please complete the LDRA reply form or email info@ldra.com

Benefits

Visure Requirements offers:

Certification support to industry standards, such as DO-178B/C, ISO26262, IEC62304, FMEA, FMECA and GAMP5.
One complete platform for all the requirement related activities
Process enforcement through a flexible solution which supports different process models including Automotive SPICE, CMMI, V-model, Agile and ad hoc.
Improved team communication and collaboration through role-based capabilities.
Support for better quality products, and reduced software defects
Graphical Requirements Structure
Visure Requirements graphically displays relationships between the elements and helps understand the requirements process, from the flow down from user to system requirements and from there to software, hardware and mechanical requirements, down to agile elements such as themes, epics, and stories.

Visure Requirements can be initially configured in a very simple and straightforward way helping users collect all requirements in one single platform and structure them according to the needs to offer a very easy start, but can also be configured to satisfy advanced expert expectations, supporting complex traceability, configuration management or reporting.

Regulatory Compliance

Visure Requirements facilitates the regulatory compliance of international standards such as DO-178B/C, ISO26262, IEC62304, FMEA, FMECA and GAMP5 helping standardize and enforce a requirements process containing all activities and elements required to fulfill the standard, like full traceability or risk management. Visure Requirements provides a centralized database that contains all requirement-related information from requirements to test cases, use cases, glossary or risks, the configuration management of all these artifacts and full end-to-end traceability between these components. Reports with the latest information from the database can be generated to deliver evidence to the certification authorities.

Mitigate Risk

From writing better requirements through semantic analysis and prioritizing needs to providing one of the industry’s most powerful change impact analysis capabilities, Visure Requirements helps avoid pitfalls and mitigate risk each step of the way.

The test case support in Visure Requirements allows defining a validation and verification process in the same platform to represent the requirements coverage and quickly identify unfulfilled customer and market requests.

Product lines and variants

Defining a catalogue of high quality, reusable components of requirement specifications, use cases, test cases and traceability can become an extremely valuable asset for the company.
Visure Requirements helps create this catalogue and build new products and variants for different market segments in a highly efficient way.
Visure Requirements ensures that all the products reusing similar features in a product family are kept up-to-date by automatically synchronizing changes to the original features in the catalogue to all variants.

Collaboration

Visure Requirements contributes to engage all stakeholders by using a centralized database which can be directly accessed by all teams through role-based and tailored interfaces, and facilitating the communication between customer and supplier through offline capabilities like the exchange of MS Word, MS Excel or XML documents or through online, web interfaces. Visure Requirements also helps engineering teams from different disciplines collaborate accessing the latest information in the database through integrations with the most common tools in the rest of the phases of the lifecycle and through open APIs.

Features

Feature List

Requirements gathering	Support to UML and functional diagrams to represent concepts beyond plain text, and be able to better understand the problem and extract requirements.
Requirements import and export	Capture requirements through import and export to and from MS Word, MS Excel, DOORS, Borland CaliberRM.
Manual capture of requirements	Definition of requirement templates e.g. user, system, component requirements, with default codes, attributes and descriptions.
Semantic analysis	Semantic analysis of the requirements and complete specifications in order to identify low quality during requirements specification.
Requirements analysis	Multiple representations of the requirements in regards to their relationships and their properties.
Risk Management	FMEA/FMECA support by representing risks (severity, occurrence, Detection, RPN), actions, traceability and other elements directly in the requirements view.
Requirements management	User-oriented management for attributes, workflows, traceability, filters and views.
Requirements traceability	Support to complete end-to-end traceability between requirements, allowing to represent user-defined types (derive, contradicts) and the direction of the relationship. The allowed relationships, types and direction between the elements can be enforced by administrators to help users follow the defined process.
Requirements allocation	Representation of system requirements and the capability to flow them down and assign them to lower level functions of the work breakdown structure, represented.
Requirements decomposition	Representation of the different components and component requirements that meet the higher level system requirements.
Validation of the requirements specification	Representation of full end-to-end traceability between all the elements and validation matrices to identify missed elements.
Requirements-Based Testing	Test Case support, with complete traceability to requirements to identify requirements coverage and the status of the requirements based on the test results, which can be logged into Visure Requirements manually, or automatically.
Requirements modeling	Specification of the requirements through UML diagrams such as Use Cases, or through functional diagrams such as DFDs, allowing tracing each element of the diagrams to the requirements.
Project management	Outline project and product organization.
Report generation	Generation of powerful reports of project information, traceability, metrics, dashboards, and output to several formats such as PDF, MS Word, MS Excel, XML and HTML.
Product line and variants support	Establish a variant and product line management process.
Reusability support	Support simple reuse of lists of functional or non-functional requirements, use cases and tests.
Configuration management	Support complete configuration management for individual elements and specifications.
Integrations and APIs	Integrations with most popular design, test, project and user management tools. Integration platform and plug-in SDK based on standard programming languages.