eDev Technologies (www.edevtech.com) announced the initial availability of its breakthrough requirements authoring technology inteGREAT Smart Docs, a Microsoft Office Word 2010 or 2007 plugin for requirements authoring and collaboration.
“One key challenge faced by organizations today is that business and IT use different tools; businesspeople tend to use tools like Microsoft Word, while IT staff use other technical tools for requirements engineering. This leads to broken communication, rekeying data, redundancy, lack of traceability and fragmentation of information,” says Asif Sharif, Chief Technologist, eDev Technologies.
inteGREAT Smart Docs allows business users, managers and analysts to author requirements with the familiar, yet structured, Microsoft Word 2010 or 2007 interface. Information from Smart Docs is automatically saved in the requirements repository, Team Foundation Server, as: goals, risks, market potential, requirements, user stories, actors, events, processes and data; along with their properties, attachments and traceability. “This provides TFS users with a very familiar user interface, will enhance its speed of adoption, while broadening its use throughout the enterprise,” says Brian Harry, Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation, Microsoft Corporation.
Smart Docs allows users to reuse requirements, either via the auto prompting intellisense feature or by dragging and dropping search results. Users can create WYSIWYG documents like a Requirements Catalogue, BRD, Use Case, User Story, SRS and other Smart Docs right from within Microsoft Word 2010 or 2007, leveraging current templates as the foundation. Once information is created in Microsoft Word 2010 or 2007, flow charts and test cases can be automatically generated. Legacy documents can also become Smart Docs, thereby bringing this content into TFS as a live link.
Documents generated by inteGREAT can be configured as Smart Docs, including the templates currently used by clients today. Smart Docs can be used offline or connected real-time to TFS. “This technology efficiently solves the real time collaboration problem faced by project stakeholders using different interfaces today, since virtually everyone uses Microsoft Word,” says Bob Savelson, SVP Sales & Marketing, eDev Technologies. General availability is expected in the fall of 2012.
