On day 2 of the main conference sessions at the Rational Software Conference / Telelogic User Group Conference, I heard many different ways in which requirements management practices are expanding in their strategic impact, not only in  software development but also on complex systems and 'systems of systems' projects.

A large government defence agency is taking their use of RM beyond the project level to use it for 'Capability Management' - assessing the strategic requirements for defence of the nation, identifying current gaps and proposing / evaluating alternative solutions for plugging those gaps. The central administration for the requirements tools and processes at this agency are also helping the users to achieve a much more personal goal of 'more golf time' by providing tools and processes to help them become more efficient.

Another great session talked about how to apply product line engineering techniques to systems and software development. Companies in many industries are providing evermore customised / tailored products to suit different demographical needs, and are often met with issues of scale - how can I add additional variants of my products / applications without exponential increasing development resources and costs? With a software product line (SPL) approach you can focus your efforts on defining the core features that your products will have and then create variation points - where the differentiation will come into your different product lines. You can then automate, like a manufacturing production line, the generation of the variants - from requirements, through design, code and tests to the software builds and user documentation. Companies using this approach have found that the upfront effort to define the core features and the variation points is more effort than they were spending to build a single product but less than the effort to build two similar products. This brings the opportunity of reaching a 'new frontier' in software development for customisable applications and product lines, because you can add new products that enable you to serve more markets without dramatic increases in your development costs and resources. Learn more here: http://www.telelogic.com/campaigns/2009/global/big_lever/index.cfm

In the great spirit of 'co-opetition' (or as I like to call it 'dancing with the devil'), another session talked about how to link business and regulatory requirements in IBM Rational (formerly Telelogic) DOORS with work items in Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server to enable development teams (using Visual Studio) to track conformance to business needs and compliance to industry requlations. More info on this here: http://www.ibm.com/software/awdtools/doors/features/MTFS.html

Ok well, that's all from me today, I'm heading off to breakfast and the keynote sessions on day 3. You can follow updates from me on the sessions I'm attending on twitter - just follow 'andygurd'.