
Ask HN: Best tools to handle complex requirements writing? - tmaly
Can anyone suggest free or paid tools that could handle complex business requirements creation.  I am looking for something that could handle a complex domain where there could be many questions that could arise from the business requirements document.  These questions would have to be reconciled before a proper specification could be created.
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brudgers
There is an established discipline of Requirements Engineering:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requirements_engineering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requirements_engineering)

Resources include:

IEEE: [https://www.ieee.org/index.html](https://www.ieee.org/index.html)

And the Software Engineering Institute:
[https://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/frame_report/req_eng.ht...](https://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/frame_report/req_eng.htm)

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itamarst
What scale of complexity? How long do you expect the thing to be? Below a
certain threshold just plain old text will do fine.

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tmaly
the situation I see quite often is someone from legal submitting a very long
set of business requirements. These requirements do not translate perfectly on
the technical side, and if the programmer is not diligent enough, what gets
implemented as a specification misses some critical aspect.

Without so detailed back and forth with say a business analyst of someone that
knows the business and some of the technical domain, the end result is poor.

Right now a Twiki or Confluence work great for collaboration of some sense.
But there needs to be some finer level of workflow that could be incorporated
into the process. I was hoping to find a tool that does requirements just 20%
better than a word processor or Twiki.

~~~
itamarst
BDD tools might be useful here: I've heard of people getting good results from
getting everyone in room and formally specifying the requirements that way.
Don't even need the tests to be executable, just well structured.

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SanjeevSharma
If you want a real industrial/DoD grade complexity capable tool:
[https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/cloud-requirements-
man...](https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/cloud-requirements-management)

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guilhas
Never tried but... [https://airtable.com](https://airtable.com)

