New Capabilities, Name for Requirements Management Tool

Projects @ Work
January 19th 2006

SteelTrace has released version 4.0 of its requirements capture and management tool, previously known as Catalyze. SteelTrace 4.0 offers collaborative functionality to capture, define and manage project requirements and specifications, lower project risk and deepen the connection between business and IT goals, according to the company.

SteelTrace 4.0 capabilities include full baseline support with merge-forward and merge-back capability; advanced query creation & filtering of projects; automatic suspect trace links; and e-mail notifications for review cycles.

"It is vital for all managers to ensure that IT investment is aligned with corporate goals and that it delivers real value. SteelTrace boosts the potential of corporate IT spend, reducing risk and improving project success rates," said Bernadette Cullinan, CEO SteelTrace. "Built with feedback from users in some of the world's leading organizations, SteelTrace 4.0 is a step up from any other project requirements capture tool on the market, accelerating the project definition process and dramatically improving buy-in from all stakeholders."

In SteelTrace 4.0, baseline comparison and reports support ongoing assessment of how much a project is evolving and changing during the lifecycle is supported by. Users can also merge changes back or forth between baselines, avoiding re-work. Securing baselines eases final sign-off of the project definition and specification.

Full, logical complex querying of project data can be enabled whether by requirement or specified custom field or property. Results can be exported to support further work or filtering on project parameters or the development of detailed, stakeholder-specific documentation and reports.

SteelTrace 4.0 also automatically highlights suspect links whenever a change to one element of the project may have a knock-on effect on another element, or file link or dependency. By doing so, comprehensive Impact Analysis is enabled. Stakeholders have full visibility of all impacts on one element of the project when changes occur in another. The Suspect Links functionality also serves as an early-warning system for potentially high-impact change.