On this page I plan to present my very own Software Project Management tool. Not sure if it will ever be offered to the public, but it might serve as a starting point for discussions regarding how to gather and manage things like requirements, use cases, business rules, quality attributes and so on…

Wreq, as the current working name goes, was initially the result of the frustration that comes out of taking meeting notes in Notepad and similar texteditors. At the end of the day, all you are left with is a mountain of .txt files with no meta-data and no relationships. So the first goal was to remedy this by building a small text-editor that would organize notes by saving them in a database and add some meta-data such as what project they belong to, who authored them and so on.

However, as with so many other ‘great ideas’, this initial goal soon grew because of the need to manage the projects that the text files would be added to, and the ‘users’ that could be set as ‘authors’ of any single file. Also, why stop at text files, why not add the ability to upload any binary file to the database?

Next I got a tablet PC for a project at work and decided to implement at small sketch pad so that you could easily scribble and sketch little ideas while in a meeting. Those too of course got added to the database.

Finally, having gotten this far, I figured I might as well go the full mile and add support for use-cases, actors, business rules, requirements, visualizations, calendars, exporting to word and so on. Before I knew it the whole thing had turned into a software project management and requirements gathering and analysis tool.

I’ve gotten a chance to use this tool together with my team on several projects by know and while it is not perfect and a lot of tweaking remains, it has proved surprisingly helpful and valuable.

If there is public interest in a tool like this I might publish the source code and the application for download, but I’ll have to think that through first ;).

Anyways, at present the tool features the following:

• Create, update and delete Projects with meta-data
• Create, update and delete project members with roles, rights and contact information
• Add and manipulate Use Cases, Requirements, Actors, Notes, Project files, Sketches and Business rules
• Link any of the above entities to each other
• Create and manage Project event schedules
• A Dashboard with statistics and info on each project
• Launch any saved Project file from within the tool
• Local or remote access to items stored in database
• Export Software Req. Spec. and Use Cases (with diagrams) to Word2007 format

There might be more in there since I am writing this out of memory, I will revisit this list when I feel like it and complete it. Also, I will add some screen-shots asap.