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The links below are mostly to the pages of websites as they existed 2000-2005, as stored on the Wayback Time Machine at Wayback Time Machine at web.archive.org and as many of these resources no longer exist they present an interesting view of methods, tools, books and other resources from that time period. For example see the DOORS orignators, QSS Ltd (before Telelogic and IBM) Happy reading !

News Update! Again in 2003 Standish's latest CHAOS report , the recent POST's Government IT Failures Report , and others conclude that problems with requirements managements are still a key contributor to project failure. A solution? - To learn about the requirements management process, download a free requirements engineering primer, find out about our DOORS DXL addins and on and off site requirements services see here or here to find our about purchasing our ready made DOORS information models

Beavers consultants keep up to date, attending conferences and using the large amount of news is available on the web, which we regularly monitor. We are happy to share with you some of the sites that we feel are useful to a wide audience and trust you will find them useful.  To jump to our key requirements management resources links click here or for our free DOORS DXL addins download page see here, or for for links to DOORS, DXL and devlopment environment tools see here.. The links below cover a broad range of other sites covering best practice, tools, and methods such as PRINCE. If your looking for DOORS information, information models, DXL scripts or addins, or requirements and systems engineering processes and can'nt see what you need here try contacting us or look at our pages on requirements life cycle process and free downloads. Beaver Computer Consultants Paul Ransley has contributed to the experts section of J Ludwigs site with an example of traceability and traceability matrix using DOORS.

By sharing information such as this we hope to create debate, get clients, developers, and consultants working together using better and more robust approaches and sharing a common understanding. If you have a useful site let us know here.  Beaver acknowledge all company names, products, trademarks and copyrights mentioned on this web site.
Site Name & Link	Our comments on the site
Standish Group	Standish are an IT and business think tank, under taking research, selling specialist reports and running conferences. These people see the future. They produced the CHAOS paper on why projects fail - requirements, methods, and false beliefs. If you haven't read this, please take our advice to do so.
Gartner Group	Another IT and business think tank, under takes research and selling specialist reports and running conferences. Its Europe 1999 conference had some prophetic presentations on e-business success factors. They have started to come true with recent high profile e-business failures.
IT Best Practice	The BuyIT Best Practice Group is an independent IS purchaser-supplier forum with a mission to 'help industry realise the business benefits from Information Systems, by identifying and promoting best practice for purchasers and suppliers".   This site has an excellent set of case studies, from Computer Weekly.  A set of CEO / Director briefings are provided on buying IT services, from the business case, through ITT's, to maintenance.  These executive guide covering out-sourcing, preparing an ITT, analysing responses, and handling the contract. The site also has a number of real life case studies giving useful pointers on the issue, the business benefits, the approach and technology used, what worked well and what did not. Founder members include: Industry: Barclays, BG Transco, BT, ICI, Bull, Shell Trade Bodies: CBI, CSSA, FEI Professional Bodies: BCS, BSI DISC, CIPS, ICAEW, IEE Government: DTI, CCTA, Cabinet Office IT Unit .
Software Engineering Institute at the Carnegie Mellon University	Capability Maturity Models or CMM for short have been around a number of years now.  These associate characteristics of the process and organisation with the ability to consistently develop software or systems that meet the customers requirements.  The most recent version is the CMM Integrated or CMM-I which brings together CMM's for systems engineering, software engineering, and project management into a common framework.  The main CMM and CMMI source is the Software Engineering Institute.  This link takes you to the home page, use the "Topics Short Cut" to move to the current CMM sections at the SEI site.
PRINCE Products and Training by SPOCE and the UK's Office Government Commerce official PRINCE site, and for other best practice guidance including programme management and ITIL see here.	This is SPOCE's site, run by Ken Bradley, who involvement with PRINCE project management and the CCTA programme management is recognised as a market leader. The link will take you to the SPOCE PRINCE© briefing paper which gives an excellent overview. Also take the time to check out the rest of the site, as SPOCE do do great training; class based, CBT, and PRINCE© guide books. They also have a product called the Launch Pad, for implementing a PRINCE based approach which is great if you are starting out, use this and you might not even need our help. PRINCE is a method based on product planning, that is networks of products in the development process as well as the end products, and that tasks underpin these products.  Task planning is therefore secondary.  This has many similarities to RUP®, MSF®, and DSDM® for example as described elsewhere in this page.  It also is strengthen by its approach to stage or iterative planning, the combined role of the user, client, project manager, and senior developers as the decision making process, and review, risk management, and configuration / change control and filing processes.  These transfer well to the other methods. PRINCE© (PRrojects IN Controlled Environments) is a structured approach to Project Management, and is owned by the UK Office of Government Commerce (formally the (CCTA - Central Computer and Telecommication Agency).  Use this link to go to the CCTA PRINCE site and look at a set of standard project templates.  The  site includes PRINCE materials, an overview and publications for the CCTA programme management guidelines, and a link to the ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) which includes details and publications on IS management aspects including performance, benchmarking, help desk and problem management, configuration management, and service level agreement management.  Details of Programme Management can be found also be found at the OCG site which contains links for purchasing the Managing Successful Programmes, a free RFT summary,  and also professional services through the APM.
iSixSigma	This is an excellent six-sigma resource site. Many methods are applicable to systems engineering, including methods for process design and continuous improvement, the concept of "Voice of the Customer", use of statistical process control and management through the use of data (metrics), and process capability levels (a different perspective to capabilities in the CMM / CMMI context) for example. Again we see methods using common techniques such as QFD and FMEA. We use the much of what is now called the Six-Sigma tool kit to develop and improve processes and to elicit and prioritise customer needs and relate these to the design and manufacturability.
Tools and Methods	This is an independent site giving details of software tools for requirements, analysis, testing and more. Also has overviews for most of the main analysis and design methods. SITE CURRENTLY BEING UPDATED
Telelogic DOORS®	Telelogics DOORS®, is a requirements management tool which Beaver use in providing its requirements management services. DOORS is an acronym for Dynamic Object Orientated Requirements System.  It is powerful and extendable application and is available in native and internet/intranet (DOORSnet™) versions. These allow data to be shared by development teams across an organisation, through the project life cycle, and in many locations. It provides the key requirements tools functions including unique numbering of objects, allows user defined attributes to be associated with each object or requirement, and allows traceability between objects, requirements, or sections of text to be easily added. Data can be directly entered or import from Word and other applications. DOORS can produce its own reports, can be exported to a variety of applications including Word and MS project, or through the use of Telelogics DocExpress can produced highly customised reports in Word using DOORS, VISIO and Rational ROSE data, formatted to many industry standard formats or you can specify your own. DOORS includes functions to provide a change control mechanism and also records all changes made to objects and attributes.  DOORS can store user defined baselines. DOORS is simple to use but powerful and has a script based programming language, DXL, which can be used to further customise the tool such as performing simple repetitive tasks or complex add-in tools and interfaces. Importantly the requirements can be decomposed within DOORS to analysis, design and test documents and to record test results, or be integrated with other Telelogic or 3rd party best in class analysis, design, test and configuration management tools e.g. StP, ROSE, Artisan, Together Soft, Test Director, PVCS, MKS Integrity Manager.  Data from DOORS and test tools can also imported into metrics tools such as MetricCentre from Distributive Inc. Beaver has considerable experience in developing DOORS information models, customising DOORS to implement processes and reporting on progress and quality, developing DXL addins and mentoring new and experienced users. See here for details of our DOORS related services and products and here for a statement on DOORS related services as part of our capability statement.
CASEwise®	Beaver use CASEwise Corporate Modeller®, which is an upper level CASE tool.  A best of breed product, providing a set of modeling and simulation tools aimed at business processes analysis and improvement.  It allows related models covering processes and the organisation structure, as well as more traditional data flow diagrams, to be associated with existing or future applications, locations, resources and other detail.  This information can be analysed in matrix form.  It is however dynamic, and when supplied with data on event rates, through puts, touch times, resources and if desired costing information, can simulate the randomness that occurs in real systems, show bottle necks, cost drivers and the financial outcome of the process.  By modelling and validating the current system (AS-IS) as well as future alternatives (the TO-BE's) the tool provides valuable insights into current problems and future solutions, and the the results input into the decision making process and requirements derivation process.  We are an Associate programme member.  CASEwise® has an add-in allowing in to link to DOORS®.
Simul8™	This is a dedicated simulation tool, similar to CASEwise® but has the facility to add failure rate and repair time information to processes (which could also represent machines), multiple activities or inputs to the same process, and provide conditional routing of a work item through the process.  Beaver use Simul8 to build more advanced simulations such as work flows, object - use case - event sequence models, and performance studies.  Using add-ins we can build up detailed timelines, resource and process utilisations, and cost build ups.  As Simul8 can read in VISIO® diagrams as the basic building block to which the numerical data is added we can export from CASEwise® in VISIO® format then read in to Simul8™ or vice-versa.
Rational Tools and RUP®	This site has the full Rational range of products including the requirements tool Requisite Pro®, other tools such as ROSE®, ClearCase and ClearQuest and products and support for the Rational Unified process.  Beaver can use Requisite Pro, has experience in using many other Rational Tools, and uses the processes consistent with and round RUP.  Look at the papers such as those on the RUP process and web development issues - go to the white papers section or use the site search facility for; Rational Unified Process White Paper: Best Practices for Software Development Teams A Rational Development Process, by Philippe Kruchten RUP® is provided as a purchased tool providing online HTML based support  and contains additional briefing papers and templates in Word and PDF formats.  As well as the workbench tool the RUP artifacts, process descriptions and work flows are documented in a number of papers and books.  The 2 papers above provide outlines and additional details are given in the book Managing Software Requirements by Leffingwell and Wildrig, published Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-61593-2 and in an RUP : An Introduction (2nd Ed), by Kruchten,published Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-70710-1. Many of the papers included in the RUP work bench tool are also referenced in the above books and papers and can be freely downloaded from the Rational Site - go to the white papers section for a complete listing of available papers. Beaver can assist in implementing methods such as RUP, customising it the RUP tool, and producing additional html or PDF based add-in documentation based on RUP Workbench format subject to you purchasing  the appropriate client license(s). For examples of our requirements process and information model products see here.
Artisan and RtP®	Artisans main product is a round trip engineering CASE tool for UML with extensions for real time systems. The tool can link to DOORS and Faceplate, a GUI simulation interface, which combines to produce a powerful combination. This link points to the site page for Artisans Real Time Perspective (RtP), an iterative process for developing real time systems, its free just requiring you to register. Once registered it will take you to Mentor which is an on line RtP manual describing the processes, roles, documents, and methods. Its a good complement to the more widely known RUP from Rational, along with DSDM® and PRINCE© described elsewhere on this page. Beaver can assist in implementing methods such as RtP, customising it, and producing html based documentation.
INCOSE and INCOSE UK	We are a systems engineering consultancy - but what is systems engineering? The purpose of systems engineering is to assure the fully integrated development and realisation of products which meet stakeholders’ expectations within cost, schedule, and risk constraints. It is an interdisciplinary approach encompassing the entire technical effort to evolve and verify an integrated and life cycle balanced set of system, people, product, and process solutions that satisfy customer needs. It includes; - technical activities for development, manufacture, testing, roll out, operations, support, disposal, and user training for the system and processes - definition and management of the system configuration - translation of the system definition in to a project Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) - development of the information for management decision making It has typically been used on large, complex software and technology driven projects with multiple suppliers but is increasing being used for the development of many business systems. The approach has includes most of best practice elements now found in methods such as RUP. Systems engineering focuses on the translation of business or mission requirements into real, integrated solutions. Requirements are elicited with a variety of methods, and decomposed into a lower level specification, which is then tested to show the lower level requirements will deliver the original business or mission requirement. This is important as many high level requirements are achieved by the creation of desired emergent properties rather than a specific lower level function. Its about how a combination of lower level requirements come together to create a higher level function which is not immediately apparent. It is very much the sum is greater than the parts. Systems engineering provides a requirements driven process, with modelling and analysis to decompose and test requirements, and develop and measure metrics that apply to the solutions design, manufacture and entry into service. It utilises measures of issues, assumptions, and risk and monitors and controls the convergence of the solution and reduction in uncertainty as the life cycle is progressed. To find out more look at this site which is run by the International Council on Systems Engineering. Download brochures, guides, papers, news letters, and obtain details of conferences, seminars, and its journal. Plenty of web resources are listed as well.  The site has a range of downloads, including a Requirements Metrics primer, and a maintained survey of requirements tools.
DSTAN	This is the Ministry of Defence public site where you can view or download standards on topics such as safety, reliability, ILS, and configuration management, as well as techniques such as HAZOPS (see DEF STAN 00-58).
DSDM® Consortium	This is the official site for this public domain method, and contains an excellent overview, as well as details on training, membership, publications, and list of member companies.
MSF	MSF© is the Microsoft Solutions Framework, similar to RUP and other iterative, requirements driven, and risk based development approach found on the practicalities experienced in the real project world.  Like the other methods it can be visualised as a network of products through VISION documents, functional specification, and testing specifications are all formally managed, and ensuring the client organisation is well prepared (readiness).
Reliability Analysis Centre	US DOD sponsored site acting as a focal point for military and commercial groups interested in keeping up to date on RAM issues. An excellent resource are the AIC's current awareness short papers known as the START guides ("Selected Topics in Assurance Related Technologies"). These are free pdf format papers on various methods and approaches on key topics e.g. performance based requirements, high reliability, testing high reliability systems, spares provisioning, six sigma and more.
ZIFA	The Zachman® framework has been around years but only recently has its relevance been really recognised. Zachmans early work looked at the simple logic of business objectives and how these are translated into a design and specification. He recognised many methods merely cater for a particular group - the business manager, the IT group, the supplier, the network builder and then each of these had process, functional, data, organisation, and physical views, and this made communication between groups problematic, compounded the issue ensuring consistency between each groups methods, and ensuring the design and its implementation actually deliver the business needs. Zachman produced a simple framework to show how it fits together, how to document the existing and the future vision, but of course the biggest contribution is a visual way of seeing how much is covered and the uncertainly perhaps by what's missed out. Most importantly is allows many different groups to communicate the architecture of an enterprise. The papers on this site are short and to the point.
Humans & Technology	Alistair Cockburn's Humans and Technology site, loads of details on project management of software and complex projects, and his Use Case and CRC papers. Alistairs use case papers, particularly on goal based approaches, are important works with an emphasis on the textual information in a use case not the diagrams themselves. We believe his current draft book on Use Cases will be an important non OMG source, addressing many outstanding issues.  He has authored several titles under the Addison-Wesley OO series.
Atlantic Systems Guild	The Guild includes major names in systems development, CASE tools, and IS thinking. This is the home of the VOLERE© requirements template, an excellent starter if you wish to build a user specification without Beavers support. VOLERE is now supported by the book "Mastering the Requirements Process authored by the Atlantic Systems Guilds partners the Robertsons'. We do not believe VOLERE or the book answers all questions on how to fully elicit and test the requirements, particularly those that are non-functional, or make use of RAD and latest OOA methods, but it is one of the best public domain sources available and is therefore worth a special mention here. Its a good companion to their older book "Complete Systems Analysis".
IOSH	UK Institute of Occupational Health and Safety site, includes an open discussion board, information on careers in safety management, membership, publications
Safety and Reliability Society	UK Safety and Reliability Society. Learned UK group, has news letters, details of seminars, conferences, and publications.
UK HSE and HSE Books	The UK Health and Safety Executive, information on regulations, the HSE, area offices, basic overview, and yearly reports. Use HSE books to see the list of free and priced books and leaflets and buy on-line.
British Computer Society	The British Computer Society society is comprehensive. Overview of the society and its branch and SIG structure. We suggest you follow the links on the site to the special interest and affiliate groups which include Requirements Engineering, Business Systems Group, Internet, and the Safety Critical Systems Club. The site also has details on membership, BCS qualifications, training courses including the ISEB vocational courses including downloadable course outlines, sample examples, and model answers. The BCS site also has a large news section and archive and details of reports such as the excellent E-Commerce Guide suitable for anyone requiring a quick overview, and publications including online editions of its journal. The BCS is a society for any one with an interest in or an involvement with, IT and modern communication systems.
IEE Computer Forum	The IEE Forum has regular short articles on business and technology as well as other services. You do NOT have to be a member of the IEE or BCS to access it, you only have to register and its free. Large archive of topical papers and a discussion board are 2 of the main site features including short introductions on IEC 61508, a standard covering safety management of programmable electronic systems.
Plans and Manuals	If you are looking to understand how many process standards, military and civilian, fit together OR urgently need a Plan template, go to this site. Beaver Computer Consultants can customise its own plans for you quickly, but if you need it fast, go here. They also sell book and CD versions.

General Requirements Management Web Resources Many sites exist on the web dealing with requirements management.  Rather than listing all papers, books, tools reviews and alike on our site we suggest you use these resources.  In addition the INCOSE web site detailed above contains a lot of requirements management information including a detailed review of requirements tools.
Discovering System Requirements at the Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering , the University of Arizona	A short paper explaining what requirements are and a simple process model, with good examples of textual and notation based requirements including UML interaction diagrams and formal methods, and acts as a good introduction to our own process models and requirements management primer given here. As well as the "Discovering System Requirements" paper, the SIE site contains good systems engineering resources. The following paper at SIE provides an excellent overiview of the systems engineering process using their SIMILAR process model. The SIE site also has a comprehensive slide libary from its academic program.
Joyce Ludwigs Requirements Site	This is an excellent site.  A very concise introduction to requirements management outlining the principles and terminology and provides a useful listing of other web sites and requirements management tools. Beaver Computer Consultants Paul Ransley has contributed to the experts section of the site with an example of traceability and traceability matrix using DOORS.
CrossTalk	Crosstalk is the Journal of Defense Software Engineering, and has been serving the software and systems engineering community for many years. CrossTalk covers topics such as methods, process, and standards. The site has a complete Crosstalk archive. This is one of our main reads, along with INCOSE's Wiley's Journal of Systems Engineering and Springer-Verlag's Requirements Engineering. While CrossTalk is free online, Requirements Engineering and Systems Engineering can be obtained at a lower subscription rate by joining the British Computer Societys Requirements Engineering Specialist Group and INCOSE.
Ian Alexander	Ian is a requirements engineer, active in the British Computer Society Requirements Engineering special interest group, and has an interest in scenario and use cases.  He has considerable experience with DOORS and has developed a number of DXL add-ins which he has made available for free down load from his site.  The scenarios add-in implements the use case format promoted by Alistair Cockurn (see Humans & Technology link above).  Ian also provides a number of detailed book reviews on requirements management, software engineering, and related subjects, as well as papers he has written.  Ian provides an interesting commentary on requirements tools which complement the INCOSE survey.
Requirements Management Place - Site Currently Down	Set up to serve the requirements community and the white paper links gives you easy access to some of best collections of papers available on the net.  It also supports an active discussion forum.
Gilb	Tom Gilb's work in systems and software engineering is well known and has always been forward thinking, covering requirements management, iteration based project planning, quality review and improvement methods. The requirements and planning language, what he calls "Planuage", is very similar to our own process and how we configure DOORS to hold requirements and project data. Perhaps Tom is most often associated with Formal Software Inspection methods, in fact a complete process to remove defects and uses results to feedback to improve the process and implementation. We have used Gilbs Formal Inspection method (and Fagan) to implement the Quality Review Process together with using the defect densities to specify iteration Quality Criteria and as the exit criteria for products in PRINCE based projects. This is an example of how our approach blends together best practice from a variety of sources. Toms site provides a complete set of free downloads documenting these approaches - look for his works on Planguage and Evo.
EBG Consulting	Our services and this web site deals primarily with requirements and the process mechanisms and support for the process by requirements tools. The importance of requirements is recognised by Standish, OGC, POST and others. However one other factor is deemed at least, if not more, critical (see CHAOS report). That factor is involvement of users, sponsors, in fact the complete stakeholder community. This makes sense in that these groups provide the stakeholder needs, a subset of which become agreed requirements, and they accept the solution once delivered (hopefully against the agreed requirements), and can provide ongoing feedback. As well as elicitation of requirements and there validation, user interaction also includes negotiation and trading of the requirements whilst gaining buy-in and consensus. Much of this can be acheved in workshop type environments. So requirements management can be considered a collaborative process between the various parties. Ellen Gottesdiener's company focuses on these issues, the website is a major resource on such collaborative processes, and the approach is documented in the book "Requirements by Collaboration:Workshops for Defining Needs" (Addison-Wesley, 2002). If is also worth looking at is Beyer and Holtzblatt's approach known as "Contextual Design" - details of which can be found InContext Enterprises Inc's website.
Control Chaos	Following on from the above comments on user involvement with EBG Consultings website, part of our thinking is wrapped up in Scrum as a project control approach, as we are very iteration based, combined with XP (eXtreme Programming) type practices, as these apply to systems engineering projects as well e.g. user involvement, testing, pairing. This site provides a quick overview of Scrum as well as XP, and has further links for specific details.
NASA Software Assurance Technology Centre	An important aspect of our work is the relationship to the quality of the requirements, the scope, and the measurement and management of risk.  This site provides a number of tools, such as ARM and a collection of papers addressing this topic.  The metrics page of the SATC also links to the Practical Software Measurement consortium who provide the PSM manual as a free download.  PSM is about practical measurement of progress and quality.  Its a good cross over to the metrics aspects of the SEI CMM and CMMI (see above for links).Other NASA resources is the systems engineering practices manual (this link starts a 2.6MB download).
SubSeaexplorer.org	The 2020 Update on this links and resource page reflect new areas of application using process and tools as used by the team behind the original Beaver Consulting website: Process and tools such as requirements management, with its information schema and traceability, V&V for monitoring compliance, and methods for analysing threats and assessing risk, both to support decision making including the use of the systems approach to problem framing, systems thinking and developing systems models to aid understanding of view points and relationships, can be applied to many situations. This site introduces the use in support of the UN Sustainability Development Goals (SDG) and Regional Management Plans for various UN initiatives. The systems approach, combined with requirements and V&V also feature as part of the design process for low cost ROV development, along with systems effective analysis in design and trials, to evaluate solution options.