News

Catalyze Helps Capture Business Requirements

• By Linda L. Briggs
• May 11, 2005

A good business requirements tool can help you gain the understanding and agreement of everyone involved in a software project, from customers to the business side to the technical team. That can speed time to market and reduce development costs by helping you quickly document and share information among stakeholders.

SteelTrace, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, develops business process and requirements tools to help link customer requirements with system specifications. Its new Catalyze 3.1 tool suite adds new functions to the product, which offers business and systems analysts, software project managers, marketing teams, customers and others the ability to capture, document and model requirements and specifications.

Software developer Crosswalk is using Catalyze 3.1 to capture customer requirements directly from users and to share requirements specifications with appropriate team members across the company. Crosswalk develops storage management solutions for mid-market companies. Innovation and time to market are critical, according to software project manager Rebecca Baum, which means that marketing and engineering must work closely together.

The company previously used a static method of collecting user data into Word documents. Now, Baum says, “Marketing, engineering and even sales can have visibility into requirements.” The new product allows her to prioritize various requirements, trace the history of any changes and limit access control so that not everyone who views requirements can change them. She plans to eventually integrate the product into the testing group as well.

The enterprise version of Catalyze 3.1 supports multiple loading of repository projects and concurrent asynchronous updates. Users can make changes offline, then reconcile them with the master project. Catalyze uses SQL for database interaction and ships with support for Microsoft SQL Server 2000, MySQL and Oracle 9i support. SteelTrace products also integrate with tools in the UML modeling space, including Compuware Optimal/J, IBM Rational Rose, Mercury Interactive TestDirector and Borland Together, allowing Catalyze projects to be opened in the UML modeling tool in use.

The list price for Catalyze 3.1 ranges from $2,895 to $4,895 per user, plus an annual support and maintenance fee.