rmtoo is a free and open source requirements management tool.
rmtoo uses a different approach than most other requirements management tools: it comes as a command line tool which is optimized for handling requirements. The power of rmtoo lies in the fact that the development environment can handle the input and output files - there is no need for a special tool set environment.
Example: if you need to handle baselines (and there often is), rmtoo can be configured using a revision control system (e.g. git). The revision control system can handle different revisions, baselining, tagging, branching and many other things extremely well - there is no reason to reinvent the wheel and making it less efficient.
Let one thing do one thing.
rmtoo fits perfectly in a development environment using text editors and command line tools such as emacs, vi, eclipse, make, maven.
rmtoo is not a fully integrated, tries-to-do-everything tool with a colorful GUI or different database backends.
The project is hosted on SourceForge. There is a project infrastructure including a git repository, bug-tracker, news and forums. This is the location for downloading rmtoo.
rmtoo works well as a requirements management tool. It is currently used in commercial and open source projects all over the world.
rmtoo comes with man pages which describe the functionality, the input and output files.
Included in the rmtoo package is a set of requirements that describe the rmtoo functionality itself. This provides a good overview of rmtoo and is a good starting point for working with rmtoo.
There are two presentations which give an introduction to rmtoo.
This is a good starting point to get an impression of how rmtoo can be used in your projects.
The first presentation gives an rough overview about all the features of rmtoo and reasons why and when rmtoo should be used in a project.
This presentation also includes a Do's and Don'ts list and can be seen as a management summary.
The second presentation goes in much more detail. This explains the input and configuration files which are used. It gives also an overview over the different output artifacts.
rmtoo is self contained in the sense that the requirements for rmtoo are described with the help of rmtoo itself.
Because the document was created with the help of rmtoo this can be seen as an example of an output document, including backlog, list of requirements that must be further elaborated upon and all requirement descriptions.
The requirements document for rmtoo describes every feature in detail. The document also includes a roadmap, which describes the planned but not yet implemented features.
The requirements dependency graph is one rmtoo output artifact. There is a requirements dependency graph available which describes the current state of rmtoo itself.
The topic based requirements dependency graph is similar to the standard requirements dependency graph, except that the requirements for one topic are clustered.
One supplied output module writes data in the format that it can be read by the Data Visuzalization Software 'Tulip'. Please note that the Tulip application operates on graphs - and not on digraphs. Therefore some information of the dependency graphs cannot be displayed in Tulip. It is possible with Tulip to layout graphs in 2D and also in 3D.
You've created a wonderful piece of software that fills a very specific need, does it well, and holds lots of promise for growth and maturity in the future.
Dipin, 2010-11-17
Here are two lists of links: one list provides more information about rmtoo itself and the other shows links to other requirements management tools.
The rmtoo project has the methodology 'Release early, Release often, And listen to your customers.'
There are no long development cycles: when a new feature is implemented, a new version is released. Therefore a new version is sometimes released just a few days after the previous one.
Implementing a new feature includes:
If there is a new feature it is fully available when it is released.
Each release gets a new natural number - the version number doesn't indicate anything (except that a version with a higher number has more features and hopefully less bugs).
rmtoo is copyright flonatel GmbH & Co. KG.
The tool is licensed under GPL v3.
Commercial support for rmtoo is available from flonatel's Open Source team. Please contact us for further details.
Test Case support added.
Fixed some problems in latex2 output and error reporting.
2012-03-26
rmtoo now supports multiple directories (including subdirectories) for input files like requirements, topics and constraints.
Input and Output handling is much more flexible. To implement this the configuration structure had to be changed.
Complete re-design of the interface to the version control system - this results in a major speed up especially when working with a long history of requirements.
(Extensive) logging was added: This makes it much easier for the user and our support to find problems.
Major parts of rmtoo were rewritten to reflect the current design.
2012-03-14
Documentation (only) update: the introduction / tutorial in the Readme files in the old version was broken in the way that it was unusable.
2011-12-01
Complete redesign and rewrite of the configuration layer which gives more flexibility to the user. Some bug fixes and enhancements.
2011-11-21
To date, rmtoo files were downloaded 10000 times.
2011-07-16
SCRUM artifacts were added: Selected for Sprint, Assigned, Finished, Statistics, and Burndown diagrams.
2011-05-02
Constraints were added.
2011-04-18
To date, rmtoo files were downloaded 5000 times.
2011-02-18
Added completely rewritten input and output handling for text file based requirements and topics, added dependency normalization tool which converts 'Depends on' to 'Solved by' dependency notation, and a new output module for the tulip graph visualization.
2011-02-13
Reversed way of specifying dependencies: instead of 'Depends on' the dependencies are now defined using the 'Solved by' releation.
2011-01-10
rmtoo was granted the Five Stars Award from geardownload.com.
2010-12-15
This release updates and complets the documentation.
2010-12-06
