Requirements Overview

Why Is Requirements Management Integrated in Mendix?

Development teams need to deliver applications that achieve business objectives from day one while matching and even exceeding the needs and expectations of users. At the same time, the apps must stay current with changes in objectives, requirements, and expectations throughout the app’s lifetime. Therefore, the team needs a thorough understanding of business objectives and user needs.

Between the development team, business stakeholders, and key users, assumptions must be validated, feedback must be collected, and misunderstandings must be set straight. This means that the extended team needs an integrated environment where requirements, releases, feedback, and communication are coordinated and continuous interaction is facilitated.

The Mendix Developer Portal provides the extended team with a central space for managing app requirements in a backlog of user stories. The development team, business stakeholders, and key users can all access this space, which provides everyone involved with a single integrated view on all the requirements and a space for collaborating and implementing details. The team can comment on user stories and feedback items so that questions can be answered quickly and details specified further. The Developer Portal Buzz is available in the context of every user story and feedback item, and it is also centrally visible at the project level, both on the desktop and through the Mendix mobile app.

How Is Requirements Management Positioned in Mendix?

Requirements management is an integral part of Mendix application development. Mendix helps to shorten the feedback loop between development teams and users as well as all other stakeholders in order to drive project success, lower costs, and decrease time-to-market.

End-users can easily provide feedback to the development team when using the apps. This feedback is triaged by the development team and accepted as user story. The user story is scheduled into the current Sprint and becomes visible in Mendix Studio Pro. The developer can click the link on the user story to quickly open the actual page from which the feedback item was submitted. They can then resolve the issue and quickly redeploy the application with a single click.

How Does Mendix Support Agile Development Teams?

Mendix enables development teams to adopt an Agile approach based on Scrum in which they collaborate closely with internal and external stakeholders in short iterative development cycles. The Mendix Platform supports this way of working out of the box through the following key functionalities:

  • Development teams can capture, refine, and prioritize requirements for an application in the Mendix Developer Portal with a full-fledged user-story and task backlog management tool.
  • End-users and other stakeholders can review the app and provide feedback to the development team so that the app can be quickly improved, both during development and after go-live
  • All the stakeholders of the app under development can be actively engaged in the development process through different channels.

Mendix helps development teams shorten the feedback loop between themselves, key stakeholders, and end-users so that development is effective and efficient. This leads to greater success in the delivery of app projects, lower development costs, and shortened time-to-market.

When development activities on the Mendix Platform extend to a large number of teams, some organizations require more advanced project management tools and services on top of Mendix requirements management. For this scenario, the Mendix Platform provides APIs for integration with third-party tools and services.

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