Software development projects suffer most when changes in requirements set off a chain reaction of delays, revisions and rework. Existing processes for establishing requirements are often ad-hoc and inefficient, leading to mis-communication and insufficiently defined requirements. By ensuring effective Requirements Definition (RD) at the outset – involving elicitation, analysis, specification and validation – enterprises can reduce rework, speed up development and deliver dramatic time and cost savings.
Caliber Requirement management tool helps you visualize, define and manage requirements to ensure you meet the needs of the business and deliver the right software faster. The comprehensive requirements solution is made up of three components:
Caliber Author - enabling distributed stakeholders to effectively collaborate by providing a single system of record to manage requirements throughout their lifecycle. A rich authoring environment allows teams to share requirements with key stakeholders such as quality teams and developers. Changes are tracked as requirements evolve; with automated notification ensuring affected parties are always kept in the loop.
Caliber Visualize - designed to help your teams bring requirements to life through key visualization techniques including storyboarding and interactive simulations.
Caliber Review – new license-free web based online review facility allows business and casual users to browse and comment on requirements. Reviews for all or subsets of requirements can be facilitated along with baseline electronic signature approval. Stakeholders can see the requirement details, custom attributes, visualizations, ongoing discussions and all related items via traces.
Caliber 11.1 covers everything an organization needs to manage requirements – from inception through to delivery. It combines rich text based requirements definition with interactive visualization capabilities to ensure that all stakeholders work towards shared project goals. Added visualization capabilities make for easy communication across all levels, from high level business requirements for business owners to functional requirements for developers.
Unlike most competitive products on the market, Caliber combines support for both the authoring of traditional text based requirements as well as rapid visualization through scenarios and dynamic prototypes. Powerful traceability and embedded visualization means your text based requirements are always in sync with the evolving vision of the end product. See how Caliber stacks up against the competition:
Caliber empowers stakeholders from all disciplines throughout the entire software delivery lifecycle. Key integrations that make Caliber the engine that drive successful projects include:
Caliber can generate (or link to existing) user stories related to requirements directly into Rally and provide visibility to delivery in the context of the requirement (related agile story status). Analyze real-time impacts on agile work and give team visibility back to the original business requirements.
HP Quality Center Integration means that organizations can ensure that HP testers are validating the system against the latest state of requirements.
The integration connects all the various phases and roles in the application lifecycle through deep traceability and automated test case generation.
Silk Central integration helps align project quality goals with the underlying requirements and visualizations. The integration keeps testing plans in sync with changing requirements and provides clear test status back through requirements. Early planning and ongoing participation for quality teams ensures that all stakeholders are always working towards the same shared goals.
"StarTeam integration gives organizations the ability to expose requirements directly to developers as an embedded component within the StarTeam workspace. Developers work in confidence that they always have the correct requirements to work against and are promptly notified of any changes as they occur.
Visual Studio Team System integration enables an embedded Caliber client within the IDE and maximizes the contribution of the requirements analyst within the development process.
Eclipse IDE integration gives developers in the Eclipse environment the ability to create and update Caliber requirements. Instant requirement updates ensure that development teams continue to write code while still in touch with key stakeholder needs on the project.
File version Control integration makes it possible to create and maintain traceability to version controlled documents with industry standard SCC support. Business Analysts gain visibility of source code associated with requirements throughout the development lifecycle.
Flexible Software Development Kit – Using the Caliber SDK, you can create, modify and delete Caliber information, such as projects, requirements, users, and groups. This allows you to extend and integrate Caliber into your own environment, the way you process is best supported.
Caliber enables requirement authors and TFS/VS users bidirectional visibility between business objectives, formal requirements, scenarios, simulations, actors, work items and their status; with baseline, versioning and history.
Business is under increasing pressure to meet the ever growing government regulatory compliance demands, coupled with industry standards and certification, and internal compliance pressures originating from best practice adoption, for example.
Caliber users across life sciences, manufacturing, banking, defence and government industries rely on Borland to help achieve (and prove) compliance and manage their processes accordingly. Key capabilities in Caliber that help organizations manage compliance mandates include:
Multi-user authoring environment allows you to store requirements for easy baselining and comparison. Custom attributes, spell checking and glossary features ensures meaningful, high quality requirements. Automatic versioning ensures you always have an audit trail to understand what was changed by whom, when and why.
Traceability between requirements and any development item including test cases, source code and simulations, provide end-to-end coverage and impact analysis for the life of a requirement. Visual requirements coverage analysis makes it easy to spot any gaps in your compliance mandates.
Integrating your requirements management practice with a variety of development tools is critical in order to support your mandated governance policies. Caliber supports open integrations covering the entire software development lifecycle to ensure that requirement standards are consistently maintained regardless of which tools you choose to use.
Import from MS Word and re-use requirements across projects to meet compliance and governance mandates easily. Mapped requirements ensure your teams are always working against mandated requirements.
Automatically generate template based requirements specification documents, combining both text and visualizations to communicate requirements effectively. Baselined specification generation and sign off made easy.
Proving compliance and managing your risks are made easy with Caliber’s automated test case generation capabilities. By generating test plans and helping you prioritize quality goals early on, Caliber provides visibility into risks and compliance while ensuring you are building quality into the project from the start.
Flexible security model gives enterprise-wide access to requirements for distributed stakeholders regardless of location and role while ensuring only authorized people can do certain things.
Caliber reduces the burden of proving compliance by making it easy for organizations to perform requirements analysis across projects. Data extracts into a data warehouse for custom reporting, dashboards and trend analysis means organizations are empowered to monitor and control their compliance initiatives.
Software development projects suffer when changes in requirements set off a chain reaction of delays, revisions, and rework. Caliber visualizations bring business and IT together early in the process to quickly establish and agree a working model of the desired software.
With Caliber you bring requirements to life in real time, and showcase proposed user interfaces and software functionality before you start developing actual code. This means you can get to the right requirements faster, with greater confidence, and minimize later rework. Business and IT professionals work visually and collaboratively to discuss, negotiate, agree, and publish requirements in ways that everyone understands: using visual models that replicate how the final product should look, feel, and behave.
Read our whitepaper on how visualization can bring your requirements to life and learn how requirements visualization can act as an effective method to drive collaboration and stakeholder participation.
Download the guideWith Caliber visualization, you build a simulation or prototype based on requirements gathered collaboratively with stakeholders at all levels. It's easy to use, so you can build prototypes and make on-the-fly changes as you talk to stakeholders and respond to their feedback. Business analysts, end users, and developers can each review and verify the information in the "language" best suited to their work style – through visual models, or simulations.
Caliber seamlessly combines traditional text and visual requirements, and enables requirements to be exposed and traced to by a variety of other downstream application lifecycle technologies. With the addition of Caliber visualizations, you ensure that your development team builds and tests the right software, right from the start.
Use visual business scenarios and storyboarding to discover and quickly develop enough requirements for your next agile iteration. Visual requirements ensure a shared vision that drives collaborative development.
Easily build and test web based, interactive simulations of your business scenarios using real logic and without the need to write a line of code. The right level of prototyping can lead to dramatic savings by avoiding costly downstream defects.
License-free online review and feedback collection ensures implementation agreement can be reached early and updated as requirements change. Your agile development team remain in sync with business stakeholders.
Embedded visualizations within the textual requirements authoring environment combined with links to running simulations guarantees precise, unambiguous visual clarity to your requirements.
Comprehensive traceability allows you to link elements of your visual business scenarios (use cases) to any requirement, allowing simple graphical analysis of proposed system changes.
With our ALM solution, ideas can start as a change request in either StarTeam or Caliber, become a testable requirement in Caliber, get attached to test scripts in Silk Central Test Manager, and then trace back to StarTeam for any resultant defects. This provides us with unparalleled clarity into our development and testing lifecycle.
– Emerson Sklar, System engineer, Invertix
Download Case StudyMAXIMUS uses Caliber to address the challenges associated with operating mission critical health delivery systems. Integrated repositories for requirements, test cases, and code increases confidence that requirements are fully covered by tests, reducing rework.
An integrated solution has been core to our modernization efforts by allowing us to ensure requirements are fully captured and fully tested and, post modernization, our production support information is always current so we can easily assess the impact of ongoing change. We depend on Borland solutions to enable this capability.
— Joel Levinson, Maximus Canada CEO
Download Case Study
As QinetiQ's new intellectual property is developed by highly focused but separate teams the company uses Caliber to provide a standardized approach to requirements management, software development and testing.
Of all the major Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) providers, we were most impressed by Borland's ability to focus on our business needs. The ease at which their solution was integrated with our existing tools and processes, combined with the low total cost of ownership ensured Borland was by far the best option for us.
— Dr. Carl Taylor, IT Director, QinetiQ
Download Case StudyCaliber plays a role in Gigatronik's Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI®) to drive software quality, delivering higher levels of process maturity and standards compliance.
Borland provides us with very effective support for a high maturity of development. We want to further optimize and fine-tune our CMMI model-oriented development processes in order to achieve the next level of maturity. This means that we must carry out projects in accordance with an adaptable standard process and ensure that processes are continually improved.
— Sven Sauerzapf, Head of Diagnosis/Information & Testing Systems, Gigatronik GmbH.
Download Case Study
Date: 04 June 2013
Caliber 11.1 was released on 04 June 2013. This release introduces the best features of Word and Excel together in one user interface, the ability to copy/paste requirements with trace back to source (includes parent with children) and customize the Author installation for faster download time and easier deployment. The newly rebranded Visualize is now easier to use reducing time required to perform modeling tasks. Caliber 11.1 helps organizations gain control, visability and direction for their projects, by ensuring that all business and IT are in aligment and share a common goal.
Date: 28 September 2012
Caliber 11.0 was released on 28 September 2012. This release introduces the 3 components of Caliber Author, Visualize and Review in a single solution offering. Combining text based requirements authoring with graphical visualization techniques enable Caliber users to manage and track requirements from inception through to delivery. With the newly added online Review component, more stakeholders are able to actively validate and contribute to requirements with their feedback. Caliber 11.0 helps organizations gain control, visibility and direction for their projects, by ensuring that all business and IT are in alignment and share a common goal.
Date: February 2012
Caliber, version 10.1 was released in February 2012. This release integrates CaliberRM and CaliberRDM for a comprehensive end-to-end Requirements Definition and Management solution. Its focus on providing improved end-to-end requirements integration means that organizations ensure they develop the right software the business needs, right from the start. It helps overcome the key problem of early and ongoing stakeholder involvement, ensuring that Dev managers and Business Analysts can effectively manage expectations and bridge the gap that often exist between business and IT.
Companies are discovering the benefits of requirement visualization techniques as an effective means to increase stakeholder participation and obtain early validation for a proposed system. Cost effective methods such as prototyping and storyboarding are increasingly used to elicit, validate and approve requirements prior to undertaking expensive development work. A more visual and interactive approach to requirements definition helps establish a common vision early on and also communicates requirements in a more accessible way to a wider range of stakeholders than pure text based requirements can. With Caliber's visualization capability, Borland provides a fast way to establish working, interactive software simulations that give both business and technical stakeholders an agreed goal and a common vision to pursue.
Read the blog post
In the agile world, software requirements are defined through continual exploration of the business need. Requirements are gathered and refined through a highly iterative process. Throughout this iterative process of planning and analysis of requirements, business analysts must constantly ensure that the features requested by the users align with the project's defined business goals, especially as the business goals evolve and change over time. Agile methodologies can help shape new ways to support the change towards continuous delivery of working software. It's about ensuring the right information is available to the right team, at the right level of detail at the right time so they can build the right product.
The Agile Extension to the Business Analyst Body of Knowledge (BABOK) was developed as a collaborative effort between the Agile Alliance and the IIBA®. Read more about how Agile can be succesfully implemented in your business and we encourage any requirements professionals to take at look the publically available guide.
Download the guideAn overview of the new features in the Caliber 11.1 Author, Visualize and Review components.
DownloadRead about the Caliber requirements definition and management capabilities released with version 11.1 – key features, benefits and system requirements.
DownloadDefining requirements clearly and accurately at the outset speeds software development processes and delivers dramatic savings. By ensuring effective requirements definition at the outset – involving elicitation, analysis, specification and validation – enterprises can reduce rework, speed up development and deliver dramatic time and cost savings.
Software simulation brings business and IT together early in the development process to quickly iterate on a working model of the desired software. This paper discusses requirements visualization as an effective method to drive collaboration and stakeholder participation.
Recent studies prove that only 37% of software projects are considered successful. This marks an improvement over the last decade, but it’s far from acceptable. Every day, organizations must deliver innovations such as mobile apps and cloud computing while meeting added industry regulations. Therefore, it's essential to balance Agile with traditional methodologies to improve project success. But what does that look like? How can organizations improve speed to market, meet regulatory compliance while aligning agile methods with business objectives?
An integrated approach to software requirements and testing drives significant improvements to more than just the final application; it improves the whole software development lifecycle. This is the approach to software quality championed by Micro Focus. Find out more in this solution brief