Requirement types

Managing requirements effectively is essential for the success of a project. However, ensuring that your requirements are consistent, well-structured, and meet specific criteria can be a complex task. In the past, this often required manual checks, extensive reviews, creating a lot of validation rules or external tools.

With requirement types, you can now define and enforce the structure of your requirements in a declarative way. This allows you to:

Organize requirements: Organize your requirements into meaningful categories.
Structure requirements: Define the key pattern, properties, and external properties for each requirement type, ensuring every requirement meets your project's standards.
Ensure compliance: Quickly identify requirements that don’t comply with your specifications, making it simple to address issues.
Streamline requirement creation: Quickly create requirements using generated page templates tailored to each requirement type, making it simple to create requirements that meet your project’s standards from the start.

By using requirement types, you can bring consistency and clarity to your requirements management. This approach simplifies project organization, reduces errors, and ensures that every requirement aligns with your project’s standards. Whether you're starting a new project or improving existing workflows, requirement types empower you to maintain structure and consistency, as well as streamline the process of creating and managing requirements.

If you’re looking for a quick tutorial to understand what are requirement types, check out this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXcfjU9-4ag

Organize and Structure your requirements

How to create a requirement type?

To create a requirement type: Navigate to the `Requirement types` tab. Click the `Create requirement type` button.
You’ll be able to provide a name, a description and the key pattern of requirements that should belong to the requirement type. You can use `%` as a wildcard (for example, `BR-%` to match all requirements that start with the `BR-` prefix).
Then, you’ll be able to define the optional/required properties and the optional/required external properties of requirements belonging to the requirement type. It is also possible to set default values. Note that these will not be written in your Confluence page but will appear in the requirement’s detail (+ search and traceability). You can copy and paste the default value in the table if you want to see it in the page. If you write different text in the page, it will override the default value indexed.
Review your requirement type and make sure to click on ‘save’.
Here you can find all your requirement types.

Types of properties

Quick side note on the types of properties you can set in your requirement types:

Text (String): a sequence of characters, this basically allows any value;
Number (Integer): a whole number;
Decimal (Float): a number, optionally with a decimal part;
True/False (Boolean): true or false;
Predefined list (Enum): a list of allowed values.

If the type of a property is not respected, then the requirement will be marked as invalid. You can find more information about Compliance here: Requirement types | Ensure Compliance.

How to manage requirement types?

Navigate to the Requirement types tab.
Each requirement type is displayed as a small card.
Click the More button on the top right corner of the requirement type.

You’ll be able to Edit, or Delete your requirement type.

How to view requirements belonging to a requirement type?

To access requirements belonging to a specific requirement type:

Navigate to the Requirement types tab.
Each requirement type is displayed as a small card.

Click the link displayed next to the key pattern.
This will redirect you to the `Search` tab with the appropriate search query.

Ensure Compliance

What happens when a requirement is invalid?

When requirements don’t comply with the defined specifications:

They are displayed in red throughout the application.
There are error messages when viewing the requirement popup (in RY Tabs).
There are error messages when viewing the requirement page.
You can find invalid requirements using the search syntax (e.g. ruleStatus = false).

How to manually validate requirements?

In general, when requirements are updated they are automatically revalidated.

However, there are still some cases where requirements are not automatically revalidated.

To force the validation of all requirements belonging to a requirement type:

Navigate to the Management section.
Navigate to the Requirement types tab.
Each requirement type is displayed as a small card.
Click the Validate button on the top right corner of the requirement type.
This will trigger the asynchronous validation of all requirements belonging to a requirement type.

Streamline requirement creation:

How to create a requirement page?

Once you have created a requirement type, you can quickly create pages using the generated page template (containing a table with valid requirement macros, all the configured properties, etc.).

The page template of a requirement type is automatically updated each time the requirement type is updated.

You can use this page template either from the Requirement types tab or directly from the Confluence page editor.

Option 1: From the “Requirement types” tab

Option 2: From the Confluence page editor

How to align existing requirements to my requirement type?

It may happen that you had already written requirements, before creating requirement types. Or perhaps, you have modified your requirement type and added new properties, and you want your already existing requirements to have those new properties. You will be able to use a Transformation rule to realign existing requirements.

Here is the documentation to the Transformation Wizard: Align tables with Requirement Types.