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Subject: [topicmaps-comment] Topic Maps for Requirements Management?
I'm considering potential benefits of using Topic Maps for requirements traceability, and would like anyone's opinions on this. Topic maps could be a good fit, I think. At first, the explosion from top level requirements down to detailed specs and then to tests and test results seems hierarchical and thereby perhaps less suited to topic maps, but in reality, each step of the explosion generally involves sets, not ordered lists, and those are very suited to being represented by associations. Topic maps would let you form all kinds of groupings, temporary or otherwise, for tracking purposes, and that should be a big benefit. You could also add any kind of annotation without having to change a rigid database schema. Other potential benefits would be the ability to export in a standard format that could be used by other tools, and the ability to have built-in semantics for various relationships, roles, etc. How many requirements could be handled in practice? I'm not clear what the potential users here might need (one possible project would probably be relatively small, less than one thousand requirements and spec items, but another could get quite large, several tens of thousands at least). As I see it, for requirements traceability you don't need everything in the topic map model, and the subset that you do need could be implemented in a relational database pretty nicely. That would be one way to get some decent scalability and data management. (For example, you don't need more than one name for a topic - I think - and you don't need the full generality of subject indicators. These two points alone allow significant simplification.) Does anyone have any real information on other kinds of implementations that could handle the larger sizes? How much memory might a map with say 20,000 topics with maybe 4 occurrences each, and 20,000 associations, take up if it were in-memory in a topic map engine (very uncertain, I know, but do you think we might be talking about say 5 MB vs 500 MB here?)? Anyone like to tackle pros and cons when compared with that defacto standard, DOORS? Cheers, Tom P
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