ReqIF in 2018: Silent growth
ReqIF, the Requirements Interchange Format, has undoubtedly become the widely accepted data format for exchanging requirements. Every serious tool supports it, and the ReqIF.academy now has over 3000 members, which shows that there is still a strong interest in ReqIF.
Nevertheless, it was quite quiet this year as far as ReqIF was concerned. There was hardly any news. But in this case, that's good news. Because it shows that the community is satisfied with the standard and is now concentrating on using ReqIF. Nevertheless, there were some noteworthy activities regarding ReqIF in 2018, which are briefly summarized below.
Only the most important topics relating to ReqIF are briefly outlined here. a detailed analysis can be found in the ReqIF Intelligence Report for 2018which was published free of charge at ReqIF.academy (registration required).
Tool support
Implementing more and more tools ReqIF. And not just requirements tools: we see support for modeling tools, report generators, integrations and much more. It is clear that ReqIF is now not only used for the exchange of requirements, but also for tool integration and process support.
ProStep activities
ProStep iViP is a non-profit organization that has always been active in spreading the word about ReqIF. In addition to an implementation forum, ProStep has now introduced further working groups for workflows and benchmarks. Detailed results are only available to ProStep members, but an overview can be found in the ReqIF Intelligence Report to find.
The future of ReqIF
ReqIF is managed by the Object Management Group (OMG). Changes to the standard can only be initiated by the corresponding OMG process. However, it has become clear that for most users of ReqIF, stability is more important than further development, and the ReqIF format has not changed since 2011, which indicates that the standard is mature and powerful enough for most use cases. I assume that ReqIF will continue to spread in 2019.
