Validata identifies requirements, tracks changes over time and, by integrating the requirements with testing, it ensures that the finished application meets those requirements. By capturing a history of requirements, including modifications, the impact of changes on your test plan and overall release schedule can quickly be determined.

Once defined, requirements can form a baseline, so that it is possible to see how they change over time. This can be very useful when grouping requirements together for a release. Changes are indicated using coloured bars, and requirements can be linked together between different documents, allowing high-level and detailed requirements to be linked together (such as user, system and test requirements).

Validata also allows graphical modelling and more formal analysis of requirements using generic modelling, providing increased clarity and improved understanding. It allows pictures, models, and diagrams to be drawn to clarify requirements and keeps this in synch with textual requirements. Models are baselined and stored with their requirement, ensuring complete consistency and traceability of requirements, and reusability of the models.

A new Business Process Manager module has been created to cover the business processes, maintain the requirements hierarchy, trace and test case associations and flat lists. The associations between the objects will define the hierarchical structure in the module, as well as the possible links between requirements and activities or traces. This was developed to provide the end user with the ability to define own types (typicals) and the relations between them, and the user interface to behave according to this metadata.  To monitor the workflow management functionality, we have developed six predefined report types, each having its own interface for creating user-defined reports. The report results can also be exported to Excel files created on-the-fly or have charts generated for them.

Requirements Management is totally integrated with Process Change Management which is a browser-based, change request tracking with customisable problem management process. It manages the lifecycle of problem reports and change forms. It also employs the concept of user roles (for example, submitter or approver), and provides traceability between change request and actual changes. The tool generates status reports and supports the collection of quality metrics. It supports task-based development with the process being configurable at any time.

The first diagram below depicts an automatically generated test coverage report showing how many of the defined requirements have been met, while the second one is a user-definable report from Business Process Manager showing the associations of instances between two workflows.