Q&A with Bob Savelson, SVP, Global Sales at Modern Requirements on Taking Azure DevOps to the Next Level
What exactly is requirements management? Known as a set of techniques used to document, prioritize, analyze, and agree on project requirements, it allows engineering teams to gather, analyze, validate, and verify a product or software’s requirements to ensure that the project deliverables meet all stakeholder expectations.
We recently sat down with Bob Savelson, SVP, Global Sales at Modern Requirements to understand more about their Requirements Management tool: Modern Requirements4DevOps and how it helps to bridge the gaps in Microsoft’s Azure DevOps.
SVP & Global Sales at Modern Requirements
What is Modern Requirements4Devops and why do companies need it?
Modern Requirements4DevOps is a fully featured, browser-based, collaborative platform for requirements definition, management, and test document automation. As it is built into Azure Dev Ops, MR4DevOps becomes a single source of truth for your application lifecycle.
With broad user adoption and a familiar MS Word-like document authoring interface, MR4DevOps helps you realize the hard and soft benefits of a full requirements suite. Collaboration is easier than ever. Your project moves briskly and meets deadlines. BAs, QAs, developers, and project managers are more productive and engaged. Your overall project quality improves.
Thousands of professionals like project managers, developers, business analysts, QAs, and more use Modern Requirements daily to save time and money. Benefits include 50% faster development and documentation of requirements, up to 10x reduction in development rework, and 40% reduction in compliance reporting efforts.
As a reliable and effective requirements management solution, MR4DevOps has won many industry awards. These include the best-in-class solution in the market, high customer satisfaction, and vendor capability satisfaction from Software Reviews.
Why integrate into Azure DevOps?
Good question! Microsoft Azure DevOps is a leading Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) provider with a comprehensive feature set, tight integration with other Microsoft tools, scalability and flexibility, and security and compliance.
While ADO leads in many areas, it’s still missing some features that could turn it into a single source of truth. These features include Word-like requirements editing, diagramming, version management, and more.
This is where MR4DevOps steps in to assist with tools like Smart Docs, Diagraming, Smart Notes and more. It really bridges that gap to streamline the entire requirements management process.
Requirements management often costs time and money. How do teams manage this?
A typical team needs to use different tools to gather and manage requirements. Some of these tools are more general purpose. Others are preferred by people with special skills. Customers request a few of our features the most:
- Smart Docs: With Smart Docs, you can make structured and living requirements documents within ADO in an MS Word-like environment, while atomically managing each requirement in the database. Teams can build and edit rich text documents using requirements already built in your project. You can also create templates in rich text or add/build Diagrams directly within a Smart Doc. It saves time and money by reducing the amount of copying and pasting you must do in and out of Azure DevOps.
- Reuse: Companies waste a lot of time copying and pasting old requirements into new projects or by redefining them again and again. With Reuse, you can lower the overhead required when starting a new project in several ways. You can reuse common elements in any design representation and reuse requirements by reference or by copying. You can also reuse documents and the Work Items within them by turning them into templates that maintain the structure of the original.
- Impact Assessment: If you want to analyze and understand how changes to certain Work Items will affect related Work Items, the 360-degree Impact Assessment module is for you. It saves you time by reducing cases of costly rework due to downstream or upstream impacts of changes.
- Simulations: With Modern Requirements, you can design high-fidelity wireframes and interfaces online using HTML and JavaScript controls on ADO itself. Developers and testers within your organization are clearer about what they need to build, saving time and money.
- Diagrams: Diagramming is a common way project managers and teams try to understand a project or product. Using the diagramming tool, you can automatically generate use cases and test cases. This allows Devs to clearly understand what they need to build and reduce development rework 10-fold.
- Elicitation: Creating the right conditions and questions for requirements elicitation can be time consuming and expensive. With the FAQ tool you can transform answers to questions about specifications directly into requirements. MR tools save you up to 13% savings in overall project costs during requirements elicitation and definition.
These specific tools are the most popular because of their ability to save teams time and ultimately money.
What other efficiency-increasing tools can the team use?
Teams tend to measure efficiency in different ways, but two big ways are time saved and money saved. So Modern Requirements incorporated a few other features that can save time and money.
- Baselining: You can capture your project requirements by taking a snapshot of where you are right now. This will give you a baseline to refer to in the future and easily compare changes that happen over time. With this snapshot, you can gain insights into how your requirements evolve and use it to create change reports. Plus, you can request reviews directly from the module to help ensure everyone is on the same page.
- Smart Note: If Smart Docs is like Word within Azure DevOps, then Smart Note is like One Note. You can take a flexible, free-form approach to gathering requirements. This includes mind-maps, meeting notes, and rich text formatting. Of course, you can turn notes into requirements too.
- MatCal: With this tool, you can do mathematical calculations with Azure DevOps. It reduces your effort and helps to manage product risks in an automated manner.
Okay, what does this mean in terms of money saved?
Over the years, we have seen teams save a significant amount of money. MR4DevOps can bring you 50% faster development and documentation of requirements, 10x reduced development rework, and 40% fewer compliance reporting efforts. All the time saved means money saved for your company. For instance, you can save up to 33% on a project with an original cost estimate of $1,500,000.
Beyond time and money, are there other soft benefits to using a requirements management tool?
Of course! This is the stuff that is hardest to measure, but even the immeasurable ones are significant. If your employees are less bored with copying and pasting, they’re more engaged and productive. These soft benefits extend to all internal and external project stakeholders, resulting in greater motivation and job satisfaction.
Does the end user benefit from more efficient product cycles and higher employee morale?
Better aligned requirements and productivity leads to better products that are shipped and updated faster. Yes, the end users are ultimately happier.
What else should we know about MR4DevOps?
Clients are building increasingly complex software as part of their overall product engineering processes while complying with mandatory industry quality and safety standards.
Time to market rules these days.
Millions of clients are therefore leveraging the power of Microsoft’s Azure DevOps/GitHub to support their workflows to build, update, and release products.
Modern Requirements4DevOps is unique as it is the only requirements tool built into Azure DevOps as a comprehensive requirements and reporting extension.
This provides clients in industries like healthcare, medical devices, financial services, manufacturing, and more with a powerful and easy to adopt solution. Users get real time information to manage products under development, create different product versions and variants, assess the impact of requirements changes, and provide compliance reporting.
Clients can automate their product development processes with MR4DevOps, thereby improving their requirements productivity by 50% while improving overall project quality, putting them steps ahead of the game.
About Modern Requirements
Modern Requirements is a leading enterprise requirements lifecycle solutions provider. Its award-winning flagship product, Modern Requirements4DevOps, is fully embedded in Azure DevOps. Referred to as Microsoft’s Requirements Management go-to partner, Modern Requirements has become an industry staple for those positioned on Microsoft’s leading ALM tools – Azure DevOps Server and Azure DevOps. Modern Requirement4DevOps supports agile, waterfall, and hybrid requirements approaches. It includes an industry-leading feature set with complete project auditability.
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