Requirements Engineering is one of the newer applications added to Aras Innovator. It enables cross-disciplinary collaboration while drafting and iterating on your product requirements. It utilizes the Aras Technical Documentation Framework (TDF) to generate single requirements, which can then be brought together into structured Requirements Documents.
Functionality
Since Requirements and Requirement Documents both use Aras TDF, the majority of functionality from Technical Documents exist in RE. On top of this, the document schema is entirely modifiable. If you need some extra functionality, you can build it in! And of course, this means standard functionality for things like graphics work out of the box.
Once you’ve created your Requirements you can link them directly to parts, or combine them to make a Requirement Document. Requirements are reusable pieces of content. They can be shared across multiple parts or documents. Within Requirement Documents, Requirements can be moved and reordered, in a tiered chapter structure. This allows for logical division of requirements affecting different parts of a product.
Installation
Installing Requirements Engineering will require Aras Update, which can be found here. Once you’ve opened Aras Update, you'll see a list of applications you can download from our servers. Since I'm running Aras Innovator 12 SP 10, I'll select RE 12.0 R2.
Once you’ve downloaded the package, click the install button to start the process of installing the package (code tree updates and database imports) to your server. When prompted choose “detailed logging”. This will help determine the root cause of any issues you may have with installation. On the following page, provide the path to your code tree, database, and provide the root or admin credentials. Here’s what it looks like for the default innovator installation.
Once you’ve filled it in, press “install” and you should be good to go! If for any reason you do have an issue, check the logs. Since we picked "detailed logs" the error is normally pretty verbose. Common issues could include attempting an install with an incompatible service pack, or choosing the wrong code tree folder. If you have issues installing, posting a question on the forums is a great way to get some help.
Veryifying
Upon finishing the installation, you should log out and back into your innovator instance. Upon logging in as administrator, you should see a new section on the TOC, “Requirements Engineering”. Within it are the Requirements and Requirement Documents ItemTypes.
To enable other users to see Requirements Engineering ItemTypes, you’ll need to add them as members of the newly added requirements identities.
Conclusion
Let us know which applications you’d like to see covered next! We’ll be making our way through all of the applications, but the order is flexible. Has your organization modified Requirements Engineering to fit your needs? Let us know how in the comments. We love hearing how people are using the product!