Over the past couple of weeks I’ve spent a fair amount of time our visiting with customers and potential customers. Much of it was spent talking about the new stuff coming with TFS/VS 11. One question that came up at probably 1/3rd of customers I visited is how to do formal requirements with TFS. If you’ve looked, you’ve probably noticed TFS doesn’t have a built in formal requirements solution. We did some work in VS/TFS 11 and Test Professional 11 to support what we call “Agile Requirements” – important feedback loops with your stakeholders. But for some organizations, formal requirements are a must – Requirements documents, detailed traceability, requirements baselining, business process diagrams, etc, etc. Several years ago we found a company called eDevTECH with a product called InteGREAT. It looked a very capable and promising product so we approached them about partnering with us to turn it into a really terrific formal requirements management tool for TFS. InteGREAT continues to evolve and is now a terrific companion product for business analysts wanting to do formal requirements with their TFS based development/test team. It is also complements well the Agile Requirements capabilities we added in TFS 11. I’ll give you a very brief overview of the kinds of capabilities in InteGREAT. If you want to learn more check out their website links above or this joint webinar we did recently.

InteGREAT connects directly to TFS the same way all the rest of our TFS client products do and stores its data in TFS.

It has a broad set of requirements management capabilities…

It enables you to enter requirements in a simple tree grid form…

Or you can edit them in a semi structured document form…

You can also caption business process diagrams…

All of these requirements are stored in TFS, available for the development team to see through requirements work items. They are bi-directionally synchronized. And all of you development team work artifacts – user stories, tasks, test cases, etc can be linked to the TFS requirements. Not only does InteGREAT provide a seamless way to get requirements into TFS, it provided some great capabilities to help you build good requirements, like a library of predefined spec templates…

And questionnaires to help you make sure you are collecting all the relevant information…

And, of course, InteGREAT provides some good tools for establishing and visualizing dependencies, creating and reviewing baselines, etc….

Further InteGREAT can help you by automatically generating test cases for your process models…

As you can see, there’s a lot of great capability here. It’s a great solution for teams looking for formal requirements. Check out the links at the top of this post to learn even more. Thanks, Brian