12 Reasons to Use SpiraTeam for Requirements Management
End-to-end requirements management is a critical component of modern software development. Unfortunately, many tools aren’t cutting it — limited traceability, rigid reporting, and tedious manual linking to test cases. To keep up, developers need platforms that keep pace with the ever-evolving landscape of software engineering.
What is SpiraTeam?
SpiraTeam is our comprehensive Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) software, engineered from the ground up to unify how teams manage requirements, releases, tasks, defects, tests, documentation, and more. Not only does it make organizing disparate information far easier, but the ability to monitor everything from a single pane of glass improves project reporting, too. SpiraTeam supports both cloud-based and on-premise deployments for different organizational needs (e.g. cloud for convenience, on-prem for data governance).
When it comes to requirements management, SpiraTeam offers unparalleled capabilities for capturing, decomposing, linking, and tracing requirements and user stories across the entire project lifecycle. This end-to-end traceability, combined with unified context, support for both Agile and traditional methodologies, and more, makes it a go-to solution for teams who want to upgrade their requirements management.
Looking for test management instead? See how SpiraTest enhances test management here.
What Sets SpiraTest Apart From Other Requirements Management Software?
Interested in how SpiraTeam stacks up against a particular tool? Browse some of the comparisons to popular platforms below:
SpiraTeam by Inflectra: Requirements Traceability, Agile Planing & ALM
Why Use SpiraTeam for Modern Requirements Management?
1. SpiraTeam Has Deep Requirements Traceability
SpiraTeam’s tools and features provide end-to-end requirements traceability across the artifacts that matter most. From requirements to test cases to defects to releases, you can view everything from our built-in traceability matrix and artifact association views. This makes it easy to see which requirements aren’t covered by tests, which defects are linked to those tests, and what tasks or code changes affected them. SpiraTeam’s ability to facilitate forward/backward visibility makes it an ideal platform for impact analysis, auditability, and formal sign-off for projects in regulated industries.
2. SpiraTeam Uses Bidirectional Aggregation
Requirements don’t exist in isolation — SpiraTeam aggregates coverage and progress up the hierarchy, while also enabling you to drill down from any requirement into the exact tests, incidents, and tasks that influence its status. Product owners can use SpiraTeam to assess a parent requirement’s mini chart and see which underlying stories have passed tests and which have failed. This means that not only do parent requirements (e.g. epics or features) automatically roll up the test coverage and execution status of their children, but also makes it easier to evaluate what defects are blocking completion.
3. SpiraTeam Shows Live Coverage & Progress Indicators
SpiraTeam’s “pane of glass” design simplifies progress monitoring by using intuitive visualizations like mini charts and progress donuts to illustrate test coverage, execution results, and task progress. All of this is updated in real-time, providing live insights into under-tested or behind-schedule requirements. The earlier these issues are spotted, the more effectively you can pivot to prioritize test design where coverage is thin and track readiness for release. The cherry on top is that all of this can be done from a single dashboard without exporting your data or building a custom setup.
4. SpiraTeam Enables Configurable Workflows and Statuses
Depending on the project, requirements may follow different paths (e.g. “draft” > “in review” > “approved” > “implemented” > “verified”). While some tools don’t provide enough flexibility to tailor this to your team’s needs, SpiraTeam does. You can define artifact-specific workflows such as statuses, transitions, who can perform them, required fields, and more, so your change control and approvals match your organization’s RM policy. Your software should fit your policies, not the other way around — SpiraTeam brings this adaptability, and you can even customize requirement types to keep user stories, features, and regulatory requirements distinct but consistent.
5. SpiraTeam Creates a Unified ALM Ecosystem
Silos can sink requirements management effectiveness, and some tools that claim to be “requirements management” software end up actually creating these barriers. SpiraTeam brings requirements, tests, plans/releases, tasks, bugs, and issues into a single ALM platform. Not only that, but it links to source code and builds, so the state of a requirement is always grounded in real test runs, real incidents, real commits, and real build results. This unified approach to requirements and development eliminates hand-offs and reduces duplication, improving the final quality your team produces.
6. SpiraTeam Has Built-In Test Creation
With SpiraTeam, users can visit any requirement’s Test Coverage tab and create test cases directly from there. If the requirement has use case steps, Spira will automatically convert these into test steps, speeding up your test design and ensuring that tests reflect the core intent of the requirement. Inflectra.ai further enhances these generative capabilities, providing quick access to actions like creating tasks and BDD scenarios, identifying risks for a requirement, and much more. If you already have tasks created, Inflectra.ai can even generate smart code snippets and unit tests so you can focus on analysis.
7. SpiraTeam is Methodology-Agnostic
Whether your team leverages Agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban or uses more traditional approaches like Waterfall, SpiraTeam will fit your needs. It adapts to a variety of different development frameworks, supporting backlogs, releases/sprints, and planning boards, as well as traditional planning. This maintains a consistent requirements management process, while your delivery teams can use the practices that fit their work. The result is top-quality requirements and traceability, regardless of the chosen methodology.
8. SpiraTeam’s Drag-and-Drop Interface is Intuitive
The best requirements management tools make it smooth and easy to structure and groom your backlog. SpiraTeam has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that makes it effortless to move requirements around, rearrange hierarchies, re-order backlog items, and manage work on boards. This is a game changer for analysts, who can now group, decompose, and reprioritize requirements quicker than ever, which is important as project scope and understanding are shifting quicker than ever. Instead of spending time wrestling with your requirements management platform, SpiraTeam helps you spend more time refining what users actually need.
9. SpiraTeam Puts Powerful Reporting at Your Fingertips
Clear answers are paramount for modern software projects: What’s approved? What’s covered? What’s ready? SpiraTeam comes with customizable dashboards, reports, and web-based charts that can hone in on requirements with industry-leading clarity. These analytics tools enable quick and easy access to digestible information about coverage by release/sprint, unmet acceptance criteria, defect density per requirement, and much more. With these report templates at your fingertips, it’s easy to build powerful dashboards that satisfy internal governance or external audits (while avoiding blank page syndrome).
10. SpiraTeam Integrates With the Tools You’re Already Using
Most development teams have a workflow and toolset that they’re used to. Integrating a new platform shouldn’t require migrations from other systems that don’t work with the new one. SpiraTeam avoids these headaches by seamlessly integrating with some of the most popular and common platforms, like GitHub/GitLab, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, and Jira. Teams can synchronize issues and work items, link requirements to commits, pull requests (via Git integration), and associate CI builds to show which ones implement or validate specific requirements. As a result, SpiraTeam ensures that your requirements remain the single source of truth, even across multiple tools.
11. SpiraTeam is Scalable and Cost-Effective
SpiraTeam is not only offered via both cloud-based and on-premise deployment (or hybrid), but its concurrent-user licensing makes it far more cost-effective than other options. Concurrent-user licensing means that you don’t pay for dozens of named seats that don’t get used — you only pay for active seats that can be shared between multiple users. For example, we compared SpiraTeam’s monthly costs to Jira’s (add-ons also charge per named user) and found that SpiraTest was about 37% cheaper due to its built-in capabilities and pricing structure. This reduces runaway costs, making it scalable for growing teams — especially those who are globally-distributed in different time zones (so people can use the seats while others are offline).
12. SpiraTeam has High User Satisfaction
Beyond the capabilities, adaptability, and pricing, SpiraTeam also leads the way in partner satisfaction, scoring significantly higher than competitors like Jira and Jama Connect on third-party review sites like TrustRadius and PeerSpot. This boils down to how easy it is to link requirements to tests and defects, its flexibility, and our unmatched customer support. All of these come together to provide an industry-leading requirements management experience, which is further backed up by SpiraTeam’s testimonials (including how it bridges the gap between dev teams and reports for executives).
Upgrade Your Requirements Management with SpiraTeam
There are numerous reasons to use SpiraTeam for your requirements management and ALM needs. From deep functionality to cost-effectiveness to real-world user reviews, SpiraTeam sets itself apart from any other requirements management software. If you’d like to learn more about the SpiraTeam platform and how it can improve and streamline your ALM activities (including requirements management), browse some of our additional resources and related pages below:
