Where development projects fail to meet requirements, visualization tool maker iRise sees an opportunity. The company introduced yesterday a new edition of its namesake requirements modeling solution, with a broader range of visualizations and the ability to integrate with third-party development tools.
iRise 8, a tool for business analysts to model requirements without coding, also has an updated designer and server component.
“IDC research indicates that 70–80% of IT software project failures occur as a result of poor requirements gathering, analysis, and management, and the first gap in the process is poor communication. Visualization can help facilitate collaboration by bridging that communication gap,” said Melinda Ballou, program director for IDC’s Application Lifecycle Management service.
The updated iRise designer now supports drag-and-drop interactions to simulate end-user interactions, said iRise chief marketing officer Mitch Bishop. Business analysts use the designer to simulate a full application experience for reviewers. It can also be used to visualize requirements at the start of every sprint in an agile process, he said.
“We can visualize any application that has an interface,” Bishop claimed. Supported application types include Java and .NET programs, iPhone applications, and add-ons for SAP, he added.
To further that objective, iRise is encouraging the creation of a third-party ecosystem, Bishop said. A new iBloc API enables widgets such as Dojo and jQuery calendar libraries to be pulled into visualizations, he explained.
The iRise server component also introduces a new API for integrating with QA tools or IBM’s Rational Requirements Composer.
Pricing for iRise 8 starts at US$6,995 per seat. The iBloc plug-in API will not be available until iRise ships as a beta in June.
Other improvements target large enterprises. Specifically, the server now features a social interface for project collaboration and more scalability, as well as an API for publishing requirements models in XML as reports, integrations, or transformations for development projects, Bishop said.
