Why is Formal Requirements Tool is Needed

[sanallard072]

BAs in my company use Word, Excel and Visio for requirements definition reasonably well. What are the key advantages and disadvantages of using a requirements tool instead?

[Gentile]

BAs in my company use Word, Excel and Visio for requirements definition reasonably well. What are the key advantages and disadvantages of using a requirements tool instead?

• Multiple people being able to edit items simulaneously without conflict. Try getting more than one person to update a communal Spreadsheet simultaneously; one of them is going to lose their changes.
  
  
• Being able to assign items to individuals easily.
  
  
• Being able to see which items have been changed by other people recently easily (e.g. a work item a developer just closed and passed for testing gets re-opened and passed back to the developer because it's incomplete).
  
  
• Integrating work item tracking with the tools used for doing the work. You can integrate TFS, and other work item tracking tools, directly into the Visual Studio, MS Project, BIDS, and other tools that various members of a software development team use. You can't do that with Excel.
  
  
• Automated progress tracking. TFS (and other requirements tracking tools) give you automated reports showing how complete a project is based on how many work items have been built and tested. Excel doesn't.

[cojak]

No need to create multiple documents for the same requirements.

A central repository aids Agile working as it's the single source of truth.

[sunflower]

I agree with all these, especially the point about agile working.

Tools like jira are very handy for this.

Documents in word and screenshots can be added if the Product Owner of BA wishes.

Some companies like to use a wiki as well in addition to tools like jira. It saves fishing around on a file share system looking for documents.