Gatherspace

Gatherspace is a powerful hosted requirements management and use case tool for managing and sharing software requirements. It frees you to focus on your requirements without concern for upgrades, infrastructure, and maintenance.

This reference manual is intended to give you assistance in the fundamentals of setting up and using your Gatherspace. Everything that you need to know to be productive with the system will be in this document. For futher assistance you may email support@gatherspace.com.

Table of Contents

Overview

How do I get started?

Set up us ers Name your project Add Packages

Add business requirements Add requirements Establish Actors

Establish Use Cases Create a Glossary Add Issues

View Reports

Overview

Whether you begin with a free trial or a paid account, your opening screen will appear as shown below.

This screen is the Home Page for your Gatherspace. You can use the top level tabs to navigate to different system sections such as Requirements, Projects, Reporting, etc.

On the initial screen, you are defaulted into the ‘Requirements’ tab where you can start adding your Business Requirements.

How do I get started?

Set up users

1 Start by setting up at least one user for your Gatherspace. Click the All Projects on the upper left navigation.

2 Click Manage Users.

Referencing the upper screen, you can click on the Users link to add and manage new users.

3 Click the email address which appears.

If you are using the free trial, you are limited to one user, employing the email address and password you used when you signed up. The role of this user should remain as Administrator so that you will be able to make any necessary account changes.

4 Enter the full name for the displayed email address and password user.

5 Check the ‘Send email notifications’ box to have emails sent to the email address shown.

6 Click Update to accept the information shown.

7 If you have a paid account, you may set up additional users by entering a new email in the ‘Add User Email’ box and clicking Add User Email. Enter other information about the user as described above. These users may be assigned roles as Read Only or Read/Write, as well as Administrator.

It is wise to carefully think through what role you assign to each user. Administrator privileges should be assigned only to those who will need to make basic changes to your Gatherspace. Read/Write

roles should be assigned to all who will be making changes to your requirements. Others should be assigned Read Only roles.

Name your project

1 To give your first project a name, click All Projects on the upper left nav and click the New Project button to add a new project.

2 Select a project in the project list and click the Edit Project link.

3 Change the ‘My Project’ name to the project name of your choice.

4 Enter a brief description of your project in the Project Description box.

You can come back and change any information on this screen at a later time, so if you are not sure what you want to enter, just leave the box blank.

5 Leave the Default selection set at “Yes.” When you have multiple projects, you can set the default to “Yes” for the project that you want your Gatherspace to automatically open to.

6 The Business Opportunity and Problem Statement boxes allow you to enter information about your project – such as what role your project can have in expanding your business and the problem your project can solve. Enter information now or leave it for later.

7 Click the pull-down arrow beside ‘Project Owner’ and select the owner you want to assign this owner to.

8 Click Update when your entries are complete.

Add Packages

Think of a Package as the top most conceptual level of the requirements hierarchy of the pyramid. A package is a grouping of business requirements which in turn have requirements and use cases associated with them.

Using the example of trying to build a consumer based shopping cart, a package would be “Shopping Cart”. A business requirement of the package “shopping cart” would be “..the system will allow the consumer to empty the shopping cart.” Requirements which fall under that would be anything at the implementation or specification level that has more granular detail.

Add Business Requirements

Business Requirements are the beginning point in constructing your project specifications. A Business Requirement is a simple description of something the system will do to solve the problem at hand. It should describe the “what?” as opposed to the “how?” and not describe any implementation detail.

After some business requirements have been defined, software requirements can be added. A software requirement is a description of how a business requirement is carried out. For example, a business requirement of an online bookstore might be to provide shopping cart functionality. Some software requirements for that shopping cart might be to allow items to be placed in the cart, items to be removed from the cart and for the cart to be cleared of all items. It is important to understand the difference between a business requirement and a requirement before beginning to add business requirements. Business requirements are the top level of project definition. Requirements support or supplement business requirements.

If you find that your business requirement is long and detailed, chances are it should be considered a requirement and not a business requirement.

1 Click the Requirements tab

2 Enter the name of your business requirement in the box beside ‘Add Record.’ A description of the business requirement will be added later.

3 Click Add Record.

4 Repeat steps 2 and 3 above for other business requirements you want to add.

5 After business requirements have been added, descriptions for each business requirement may be added, along with other details regarding the business requirement. Click the Key or Name for any business requirement to open the Detail screens.

The screen you seel below is the ‘BR Detail’ screen which first allows you to view the record and do other things before editing. This includes:

1) Add attachments.

2) Copy the business requirement

3) Printable View

4) Associate and add new software requirements

5) Associate and add new use cases

6 Once you click the ‘Edit Record’ button you will get taken to the detail screen in the image below. Enter a description of the business requirement in the box provided. Text formatting controls are provided below the box so you can add bolding, special font colors, etc.

Assign the appropriate Priority and Complexity for this business requirement.

Assign the proper Status. Generally, when a business requirement is first established, it would be assigned a ‘Submitted’ status, but you can apply one of the other status levels according to the process your organization will use.

You may indicate ‘Assigned To:’ and ‘Requested By:’ individuals as appropriate.

If this business requirement is associated with more than one project (see Project Mapping below), you may indicate the primary project this business requirement is associated with.

Click Update when complete.

8 Business requirement Views – whenever business requirements for a project are displayed (by clicking Business requirements in the Project Specifications list), a choice of views is available. The Current View is shown in the pull-down selection box at the top of the screen, as shown below.

Add Software Requirements

Requirements, as noted under ‘Add Business requirements,’ exist to support or supplement business requirements. A requirement is a description of how a business requirement is carried out. After business requirements have been created, requirements can be added to support them.

1 Click Requirements in your Project Specifications list.

2 Enter your first requirement in the box and click Add Record.

3 Enter additional requirements as described above.

4 All requirements must be mapped to a business requirement. To perform this step, click the Key or

Name for any requirement.

5 Enter a description of the requirement in the box provided. A description should be of the form of “The

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