Basic Concepts

Project

A project consists of a series of coordinated and controlled activities in a certain process. The objective of a project is to meet specific requirements and is restricted by time and resources. CodeArts Req manages the project process and results to achieve the objective.

Work item

Progress towards completion of work can be manifested by a work item, which is usually with a unique ID and its description information. A work item can be a requirement, a bug, or a task.

Scrum

Scrum is iterative and incremental, and often used for agile software development. Scrum is a process framework that includes a series of practices and predefined roles.

A Scrum project team includes three roles: Product Owner, Development Team, and Scrum Master. They are responsible for advancing the project progress and delivering the project.

The product owner represents the interest owner, and the development team includes all developers.

Scrum is developed to manage software development project and it also can be used to manage a software maintenance team.

Sprint

Iterative development is also considered as an incremental and iterative development process and is called sprint for short. It steps up R&D productivity and product success rate by compensating deficiencies of traditional waterfall development.

Epic

During agile development, epic is a work item type, which is usually used to define a series of macro scenarios or plans. In addition, the development workload is heavy, and epic needs to be broken down into fine-grained work items to arrange iterative development and delivery.

Feature

A feature is a work item type, a system feature which possesses customer value. A system feature is generally the main selling point and a sales highlight of the product.

Story

A user story is a work item type, an explanation of functionalities written from a user's perspective. A good user story includes:

• Role: Who will use this function.
• Activity: What functions need to be implemented.
• Value: Why the functions are required. What value the user hopes to obtain. A user story is usually recommended to be delivered within a single iteration. User stories are sometimes referred to as stories.

Backlog

Backlogs can be regarded as different to-be-developed work item pools in different software development scenarios. For example, a product backlog indicates a work item pool contains products to be developed and a sprint backlog indicates a to-do work item pool contains sprints to be developed.

• Product backlog: High-priority requirements based on user value.
• Sprint backlog: A list of tasks to be completed in the sprint.

RR

Raw requirements (RRs) are raw problems or requirements described from the perspective of customers from internal and external. Customer requirements are a type of RRs. This type of requirement needs to be analyzed and reviewed by the RMT/RAT.

SF

System features (SFs) refer to features that bring benefits.

• IPD system device projects: SFs can have different types of sub-requirements in this hierarchy: SF > IR > SR > AR.
• IPD standalone software projects: SFs can have different types of sub-requirements in this hierarchy: SF > IR > US.

IR

Initial requirements (IRs) are re-described accurately, with complete background, in standard format, and from the perspective of customers/markets. IRs can be generated in either of the following ways:

• Raw requirements are generated by the RMT/RAT analysis and decision making.
• They can be directly generated from product planning (including system feature breakdown).

During the incremental version development, system features have become stable, and therefore IRs are used to carry incremental requirements of the version.

SR

System Requirements (SRs) are system functional and non-functional requirements that are presented externally, can be tested, and are described from the perspective of R&D. Functional requirements are scenario-specific requirements for functions provided by the system. Non-functional requirements include requirements for system costs, global quality attributes (mainly DFX), and technical restrictions.

AR

Assigned requirements (ARs) are functional or non-functional requirements broken down and allocated to sub-systems/modules by SRs from the perspective of deliverability based on the division of responsibilities of entry-level organizations

US

A user story (US) is a brief description of functions that are valuable to users or customers. The description complies with the INVEST principle. User stories are decoupled and can be delivered independently, which is the basis of agile sprint delivery.

US is applicable to IPD projects.