RAVENFLOW INTRODUCES FIRST ENTERPRISE-CLASS SOLUTION FOR REQUIREMENTS DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION

RAVEN 3.0 Empowers Business and Development Team to Colloborate in Delivering Quality Software

EMERYVILLE, Calif.—September 25, 2006—Ravenflow, the only company delivering automated requirements validation for application development organizations, today introduced RAVEN 3.0, a new solution suite that enables collaboration and communication during the requirements development and validation lifecycle. Building on the best-in-class foundation of Ravenflow's Requirements Authoring and Validation Environment, RAVEN 3.0 now empowers the entire business and development team—including analysts, managers, users, designers, developers, testers and auditors—to take part in defining and validating precise, high quality requirements.

RAVEN automatically generates visual models from plain English text, enabling even non-technical project stakeholders from across the organization to gain immediate visual feedback on use cases. This educes errors and rework, closing the gap between user expectations and software delivery. The suite's four new modules specifically focus on cross-functional collaboration as a means to reduce ambiguities and miscommunication as requirements are created, validated and revised. The new modules are:

• RAVEN Collaboration Server™ - enables analysts, business stakeholders, users, management, subject matter experts, designers, developers, auditors and testers to collaboratively develop and validate requirements and share work in progress;
• RAVEN Specification Library™ - a central, searchable web-based library of validated specifications and requirements that organizations can share and reuse;
• RAVEN Collaboration Portal™ - a portal for reviewing and approving requirements and specifications among analysts, domain experts, stakeholders, and executives;
• RAVEN Requirements Governance™ - delivers critical requirements process quality and risk management metrics.

"While development approaches from Waterfall through the Agile Movement have evolved over the years, there’s still a large gap between what business users need and software delivers. This costs U.S. businesses billions annually," said Dr. Joe Marasco, president and chief executive officer of Ravenflow. "While these models have addressed process improvement, they haven’t attacked the fundamental issue of bringing business and IT stakeholders closer together. RAVEN takes software development out of the dark ages by applying the same cross-enterprise, collaborative principles to requirements that have improved quality and performance in other disciplines, such as supply chain management or customer service."

RAVEN is the first product available that empowers the entire business and software development team to collaborate, communicate and manage change during the requirements lifecycle. Recognizing the dynamic nature of software development, the solution not only enables business and IT to more easily work together to identify and correct errors—such as incomplete processes and ambiguous statements—but also to keep in step with changes through ongoing, iterative validation. Unlike visual modeling tools that are difficult to modify and require deep technical training, RAVEN is user-friendly enough to be leveraged by business and IT stakeholders alike and flexible enough to incorporate the inevitable modifications that occur, both before and during development.

About Ravenflow
The award-winning Ravenflow is revolutionizing the way that software requirements and business processes are developed and validated. Because requirements errors are the primary cause of project failure and budget and schedule overruns, enterprises need to detect and correct requirements errors early. Ravenflow's Requirements Authoring and Validation Environment (RAVEN) automatically generates visual models from plain English text. Customers across all business sectors, including ADP, Charles Schwab, Citco, Kaiser Permanente and the World Savings Bank are using RAVEN to deliver software developed for the most valid and precise business requirements. For more information or a free white paper on early detection of requirements errors, please visit www.ravenflow.com.


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

Robyn Fernsworth
Kickstart Consulting for Ravenflow
rfernsworth@kickstartconsulting.com
415-346-5260