Madrid, Spain and Bowie, MA, January 25, 2012–Visure Solutions, the market leader in Requirements Engineering, today announced the release of IRQA Systems Engineering Template, an IRQA extension designed to address the challenges of increasingly complex embedded software systems. Embedded systems raise a plethora of design issues—diversity of platforms and architecture, increased regulatory compliance, mechanical constraints—that create a complex requirements matrix that can no longer be maintained through manual methods. As a field-proven requirements engineering tool, IRQA improves the quality and tracking of embedded system requirements through automated requirements specification and change management. Visure Solutions’ IRQA offers companies a way to gain assurance that their software functions as specified and can meet product deadlines.
The importance of robust, reliable embedded systems has grown significantly as more and more of the infrastructure that maintains our lifestyle, economics, and society depend on embedded software. This criticality has led to increased regulation of embedded systems by governments and industries that require companies to prove compliance by tracing each requirement through all stages of development and testing to validation. IRQA is a best-of-breed requirements solution that enables system and requirement engineers to improve the quality of requirements definition as an essential first step in boosting software quality.
Embedded systems now permeate every aspect of our lives, playing a significant role in automobiles, industries, medical devices, energy smart grids, and many other critical systems,” noted Baldo Rincón, CEO of Visure Solutions. “For many companies in these domains, regulatory requirements push their ability to manage system requirements beyond the ad-hoc paper processes they have used, causing budgets and development time to balloon out of control. IRQA enables companies to regain control not only of their own development, but of the regulatory processes and validation proof that is now an integral part of product development.”
Applied to the Embedded Software Requirements Lifecycle, IRQA becomes the process backbone. The requirements process metamodel, including all the requirement-related artifacts, their relationships, and their interactions with the users, are graphically represented, showing compliance through all stages of software development. IRQA helps standardize and enforce the requirements definition across the organization, formalize a common requirements specification structure, and handle changes throughout the lifecycle. With IRQA, project collaboration—whether between various software groups or with hardware or mechanical contributors—becomes easier as specific information can be communicated and shared both inside and outside the company.
IRQA helps avoid pitfalls and mitigate risk at all levels, from writing better requirements and prioritizing needs to providing the industry’s best change impact analysis capabilities. As requirements are written, IRQA Quality Analyzer performs semantic analysis to give each requirement a quality rating based on such weaknesses as ambiguous words, conditional sentences, poor structure, implementation suggestions, overlapping requirements, inconsistent use of units, and even legibility. For FMEA standards, the IRQA Systems Engineering Template includes the capability for risk assessment when performing failure modes and effects analysis. IRQA’s change impact analysis ensures that midstream requirements changes don’t breach the feasibility constraints or create budget overruns.
In a January 2010 study comparing requirements management tools, Collaborative Product Development Associates (CPDA), an analyst firm specializing in product lifecycle management solutions, released a scorecard on requirements management tools. Despite IRQA being a relatively new offering, CPDA was “surprised” by several advances IRQA delivered. In addition to praising IRQA’s graphical representation of requirements and requirements management, CPDA asserted: “Feasibility analysis is best covered by IRQA, to the full extent of the capabilities needed.”
IRQA supports a wide range of development processes, including traditional V and waterfall, as well as supporting the shift toward a more iterative process. Thanks to a central repository, developers are not limited to a web experience, but gain desktop control with the complete functionality of the IRQA solution, even when geographically dispersed throughout the world. IRQA’s structure also supports product families and variants, ensuring that a well-defined set of requirements will be faithfully rendered for each project without the error-prone work of recreating those requirements each time.
“Visure Solutions has established itself as a leader in requirements engineering by assisting with projects in industries such as automotive, aerospace and defense, renewable energies, and high-speed rail,” added Rincón. “IRQA’s process clarity and graphical representation ensure that companies have the information they need to manage current development processes, determine the feasibility of system changes, or reuse components in future product lines.”
Armed with these tools, system engineers can create high-quality requirements that are clear and unambiguous. Eliminating the guesswork and misinterpretation for design teams increases the likelihood of delivering correct systems the first time and on budget. As well, IRQA can interoperate with most popular design, test, project, and user management tools, and it has open APIs and a Plug-in SDK for customization. More information on integration is available online at www.visuresolutions.com/irqa-integrations.
A demonstration of how Visure Solutions addresses embedded system design and the presentation of the IRQA Systems Engineering Template will be viewable in Hall 4, Stand 418 at Embedded World 2012 from February 28 to March 1 in Nürnberg, Germany. Almudena Díez, Senior Consultant at Visure Solutions, together with Brim Lubos, iFEST, Masaryk University Brno, will present a technical paper on “A study of challenges and practices of Requirements Engineering and Analysis discipline within Embedded Systems Domain,” on February 29, in Session 4, at 10:00 a.m.
About Visure
Visure Solutions, The Requirements Company, is the market leader in Requirements Engineering. Through its IRQA platform, Visure offers specialized and innovative solutions for requirements engineering that enables its customers to develop the highest-quality products, systems and services. IRQA’s quality and state-of-the-art features are endorsed by the world’s leading organizations. Visure’s team has deep and wide-ranging experience in the development and implementation of requirements solutions.
Visure Solutions is headquartered in Tres Cantos, Madrid, Spain with branch offices in the United States, Germany, and Sweden. Visure has leading distributors worldwide in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, India, Luxembourg, Mexico, The Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States, among others. For more information, please visit www.visuresolutions.com.
