At the start of the requirements tool evaluation we cast a wide net, and from an initial list of more than 150 candidates narrowed down the field to approximately 65. We looked at the websites and publicly available information for each one and graded each based on whether and how well they handled each of the L1 features of the requirements lifecycle. Reviewing that info, many of our initial candidates turned out not to be true requirements management tools, so we cut them straight away. Eventually we ended up with a list of approximately 65 tools from vendors around the world. From those 65, we scheduled demos with as many as we could. This proved more challenging than we had thought. However, after making many cold calls, sending many cold emails, doing some Internet sleuthing, and calling in favors from friends, we were able to secure demos with almost all of them. Since going through the full list of 280 criteria with 65 tools would have proved incredibly time-consuming, we narrowed the list in the first round to 28 criteria that, to us and for use at ArgonDigital, would be the most important for a requirements management tool to have. We also included a few “bonus” criteria that we thought would be useful in comparing tools that otherwise shared similar functionality. You may find that list of Round 1 Criteria here: (https://bit.ly/toolmvp).

That’s where we are so far with the tool study. Next, we will whittle down the list from 65 to approximately 20 or so tools that will make the final round cut. The evaluation team will spend several hours with each tool to learn how it works and, for each acceptance criteria line item, give the tool a numerical grade between 0 (does not meet the acceptance criteria at all) and 3 (fully meets the acceptance criteria, and does it in a way that’s intuitive and helpful). We plan to publish the results of this round as an artifact of the study and make it available for free from our website, so stay tuned for that!

That’s all for now. Time to dive back in! Stay tuned for more updates from ArgonDigital’s 2016 tool study revamp, and let us know what you think!