Managing Requirements with TFS

So, I’ve always felt that one big gap in software development tools generally was that there’s never really been a truly effective way of managing requirements, and tracing individual requirements through to the code that implements them.

Sure there are requirements management tools out there, for example, CaliberRM, but I’ve yet to see a good integrated requirements-to-code tracibility tool.

TFS does have the potential to offer this, with it’s work item tracking features, and the fact that work items can be linked to code changesets, builds, etc. But I’ve not been that impressed with this from a requirements management point of view, for a number of reasons.

 Firstly, the out-of-the-box process templates offer only a single approach to requirements tracking, using scenarios. This means that if you do things differently (Use Cases – similar to scenarios, but not really the same thing, features as part of an FDD process, or just plain ol’ numbered requirements in a word doc), you’ve got to either change the way you do things, or build something yourself to handle your way of doing RM.

However, I found a series of posts by Steve Lange on RM using TFS, which gives a good overview of the topic, from using out of the box TFS for RM, through to coverage of a number of the third party RM tools that are out there now providing integration with TFS. Steve also does a couple of good pros/cons summary tables as well. Read the series here.