First Aid Kit

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Ensuring that requirements are collected and remembered properly is assisted primarily by tools for proper documentation. There are many useful products out there for handling the creation of documents, spreadsheets, and other media for recording requirements. The most common is Microsoft Office, but other products such as Star Office from Sun and the open source Open Office provide alternatives that can still operate with most Microsoft Office files.

Storing and searching versions of requirements and related documents is a job for a good version control system. Perforce, Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, and CVS represent just a few version control systems that are available. Whichever system is chosen, it is even more important that with source code version control that the system be set up for ease of use. Requirements will be handled by not only programmers, but also managers and other team members who might not be experienced with version control systems.

Another important part of the documentation process that is often overlooked is e-mail. Information that was not officially recorded could easily have appeared in e-mail. There are a number of e-mail clients available, including Web browser-based e-mail. For documentation purposes, the Web browser clients, who commonly leave the e-mail on a remote server and therefore suffer some performance penalties, are less desirable than are clients that store mail on the local machine. Advanced searching features can be of particular importance when looking for information in e-mail, such as that found in The Bat e-mail client (Figure 10.2).

Figure 10.2: Advanced search features in The Bat allow the use of regular expressions to find specific information. Here a search is being performed for all messages that contain the text indicating a zip file attachment.

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