RAVENFLOW LAUNCHES WORLD'S FIRST REQUIREMENTS DEFINITION ADD-IN FOR MICROSOFT WORD
RAVEN Express Enables Business Analysts to Automatically ID Missing and Incomplete Requirements in Word Documents with the Push of a Button
EMERYVILLE, Calif.—July 7, 2008—Ravenflow, the leader in rapid requirements solutions for
business analysts and requirements engineers, today unveiled RAVEN Express, the world’s first
requirements elicitation and definition product that directly integrates with Microsoft Word™.
This innovative solution empowers business analysts to play a more active role in the
requirements process, enabling them to automatically identify missing or incomplete
requirements in Word documents with the push of a button.
"Improving developer/client communications is a critical area for all software development
teams. The integration of RAVEN Express and Microsoft Word transforms Word into a powerful
requirements modeling solution," said Sam Guckenheimer, group product planner for Microsoft
Visual Studio Team System and author of Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio
Team System. "RAVEN's integration with Team Foundation Server provides an integrated
requirements definition and management environment. Now, for the first time requirements can
be written and validated in Word and integrated directly into TFS."
Unlike other requirements environments, RAVEN Express does not require the business analyst
to become skilled at additional applications or languages, so the learning curve is minimal and
the reward immediate. By assessing requirements directly within Microsoft Word, analysts are
able to communicate more clearly with stakeholders and subject matter experts, resulting in
increased customer satisfaction, decreased project costs downstream, and better quality
requirements overall.
“Missing, incomplete or vague requirements are still the main reasons software projects fail,”
said Susan Boers, president and CEO of Ravenflow. “Ravenflow has analyzed thousands of
specifications and enlisted the feedback of customers and prospects in an effort to address this
problem in real-world environments. As a result, RAVEN Express was developed to help
business analysts improve the clarity of requirements in an application format with which they
are most comfortable—Microsoft Word.”
RAVEN dramatically accelerates requirements definition. Ravenflow customers report cutting
weeks and even months off their project schedules as they use RAVEN to quickly build
stakeholder consensus and find missing requirements early in the process, before coding has
started. With RAVEN Express, business analysts can now additionally pinpoint requirements
problems in their Microsoft Word user stories and use cases, as well as business process
workflow descriptions.
“RAVEN Express extends RAVEN’s ability of capturing and validating requirements to
Microsoft Word—arguably the most popular environment for requirements definition, and one
with which business analysts are both familiar and comfortable,” said Kurt Bittner, chief
technology officer for Ivar Jacobson International and author of Use Case Modeling. “RAVEN
Express provides ease of use that stands alone or can serve as an entry point to RAVEN’s full
functionality.”
Current Ravenflow customers leveraging previous versions of RAVEN qualify for an upgrade
that will include RAVEN Express as part of their maintenance agreement. RAVEN Express is
available immediately.
Ravenflow and its partners will be hosting a weekly webinar series on improving requirements
practices. Registration for the webinar can be completed online at http://www.ravenflow.com.
About Ravenflow
Recently named the fastest growing vendor in the requirements field, Ravenflow software
enables business analysts to quickly build stakeholder consensus on requirements, reduce the
time required for stakeholders to approve specifications, reduce developer rework due to
requirements errors, and seamlessly link requirements and testing.
Business analysts and stakeholders across all industries depend on Ravenflow's award-winning
RAVEN to quickly visualize and validate software requirements. RAVEN integrates with IBM
Rational and Telelogic applications, Microsoft Visual Studio, and HP Mercury. Ravenflow is
based in Emeryville, CA; for more information, please visit
www.ravenflow.com.
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All products mentioned in the release are trademarks or registered trademarks of Ravenflow. All other trademarks, trade names, and/or product names are used solely for the purpose of identification and are the property of their respective owners.
Press Contacts:
Adam Frankl
Vice President, Marketing, Ravenflow
adam.frankl@ravenflow.com
