Online requirements management player GatherSpace has modestly announced its first major upgrade since its 2009 launch. Aiming to bring something fresh to the business-to-technical requirements process, a new requirements "Search Drill Down" function points users to "instantly view" specific high-priority items. There is also a new "At-a-Glance" activity tab for collaboration and workflow; and added fields for enhanced importing and exporting of data including the ability to publish web-based reports.
In line with other companies pushing out product updates of this nature, GatherSpace has spent time highlighting the "usual suspects" of its refresh such as an improved user interface as well better navigation and feel. To its credit the company has also pointed out that as a hosted cloud application, GatherSpace enables anywhere, anytime access to development-related data so that distributed teams can collaborate on requirements in real-time.
This hosted element may indeed be GatherSpace's most important ace card. With so many application development scenarios still based on requirements management taken "by hand" (i.e. using basic productivity applications such as Microsoft Word/Excel), there is still a need (for many) to bring requirements management and version control into the 21st century.
"Because GatherSpace was purpose-built for managing business and software requirements, it includes dozens of features designed specifically for effectively communicating requirements — including visual use-case modeling, a traceability matrix, requirement notifications, rich-text editing, and report generation," said the company, in a press statement.
GatherSpaces says that by leveraging the Requirements Hierarchy, users can create functional package groups, associate high level features, then associate more detailed use cases, issues, and software requirements to those features. Additionally, multiple project views enable users to "switch within its own context" to more accurately define parameters, glossary, packages, etc.
With its ability to seamlessly support Agile, Waterfall, Ruby on Rails, and other development approaches, GatherSpace also enables development teams to iterate quickly and adapt to changing business needs.
