Polarion Requirements Reviews

In the context of Polarion Requirements, we are using it for requirement management, for test activities, and to produce traceability metrics between requirements and tests in the context of medical devices within highly regulated environments.

The architecture is quite open, which means we can extend functionality and implement specific processes quite easily. That is the strong point of Polarion Requirements.

The real-time collaboration feature is built-in to Polarion Requirements. It is a web environment where all collaborators can collaborate in real-time on the same document or different documents. That is something we appreciate, but it is already built-in.

Customizable workflows and templates in Polarion Requirements are indeed useful for us. We have done a lot of work in that domain and it is working fine for us.

I find the reporting capabilities in Polarion Requirements quite nice, and for workflows, it is really excellent.

The ability to manage requirements through the whole project life is somewhat unclear. We are not using the ability to track all requirements through the whole project life for analytics very much. We have a way to easily find all the requirements of a complex product, even if they are spread over different Polarion Requirements projects. We do not have any issues in that area, but we are not really using the analytics part of Polarion Requirements.

I am satisfied with the integration capabilities for Polarion Requirements, but it depends. We encountered a lot of issues with the integration with Enterprise Architect. We were in contact with Lemon Tree company, which provides support for that integration, but we eventually decided to develop our own plugins for Polarion Requirements. That is unfortunate, but we are not really happy with their implementation.

There are things that are going really well, but alongside this, there are also things that are not yet implemented, which is quite annoying for us. The main point for improvement or lack of functions that I would like to address in Polarion Requirements is really about the review process, which is a bit too limited. When we are developing complex products, we have to review big life documents or a set of work items, but there are a lot of issues with that.

For example, very simple things: if you select a word and not a space in the document, you are not able to add comments, and it is not user-friendly. If you know that you have to put the cursor and not select the word, that is something people can live with, but for newcomers, it is frustrating. They will ask questions such as 'I cannot add a comment about this word' or for a selection of text. That is something annoying. You can do that in a simple Word document, but not in Polarion Requirements.

Also, the ability to review a table or generated dynamic content is not possible in Polarion Requirements. For example, if you generate automatically a list of tests, you cannot click on the second one; you can only click at the beginning of the generated sections.

I am somewhat satisfied with Polarion Requirements' functionality, but I feel a lack of certain functions regarding the review, which is a bit too limited. The review process is the main pain point for me, especially since we are in a highly regulated environment where reviews are crucial for us.

I have been working with Polarion Requirements for more or less five years.

I would rate the stability of Polarion Requirements at about an 8. For the latest months, we are quite happy. We never experienced any crashes. We are using version 24.4, which is the version that arrived two years ago, and it is quite stable.

I would rate scalability at about a 9. We moved from an environment with 20 users to 300 users today and we are still working fine with the initial setup of a single node environment. We have really good scalability without complaints about the speed. It is adequate. We probably scale to 500 users in the coming years because there are more and more activities on Polarion Requirements, but performance looks okay.

I would rate technical support from 1 to 10 at about a 6. They do what they can, and I always get a reply. However, sometimes they have the same limitations as we do, so they do not have solutions. There is no easy solution for the review process, for example. One issue is about the roadmap, which makes it difficult for us to raise the severity of improvements because Siemens has its own strategy with their own roadmap. They invest a lot in the cloud environment, which we are not interested in. The problems I mentioned about the reviews have been opened for several years, maybe three years ago, and we did not get any improvements in the new versions yet.

Positive

After my research, we decided to stay with Polarion Requirements because we migrated from IBM DOORS initially. We used IBM DOORS Classic for more than 10 years and we decided to switch to Polarion Requirements in 2020.

The initial setup for Polarion Requirements was quite easy. I have technical skills, so it was manageable. The upgrade can be a bit more challenging because we did a lot of customizations, but we try to do it in a smart way to keep it possible to upgrade the product. For the moment, it was still completely fine. We have to perform a lot of tests to be sure that there are no regressions if we install a new version of Polarion Requirements or if we upgrade to new versions, but for the moment, it was still acceptable. It takes a couple of hours, but it is doable.

I purchased Polarion Requirements directly from Siemens Benelux, but if you have any ideas to get a license at a better price, we are quite interested in discussing that.

In my opinion, the main competitor for Polarion Requirements is DOORS Next from IBM. Other solutions include Jama and Enlix. However, those are not as complete a solution as Polarion Requirements or DOORS Next.

Polarion Requirements is a really great product despite the limitations I mentioned and the price which is getting more and more expensive. I would rate this review a 7.

We use Polarion Requirements mostly to capture all our requirements for our project deliverables, for engineering, and we were also thinking of standardizing our technical standards internally. So, we are able to efficiently generate and cross-check all of the requirements across all our technical disciplines, and to be able to streamline those requirements together. We do find cases where it's difficult for us to actually capture and trace all this historical track records that have been changed.

We are able to efficiently generate and cross-check all of the requirements across all our technical disciplines, and to streamline those requirements together, because we find cases where it's difficult to capture and trace all these historical track records that have been changed.

The most beneficial features of Polarion Requirements for traceability include the traceability function and also the historical and matchmaking or cross-referencing, which was very good. In terms of the technical capability, you are able to trace every single requirement across all the different documentations or versions, and then you are able to see when and who has changed these requirements. This gives good visibility of what was going on and who has actually made those changes.

The areas of Polarion Requirements that have room for improvement include usability, and the user interface, which was a little bit poor. The user configuration had some issues; you need to know all the details, so it's not really friendly for those who are not IT savvy. Someone who has a good IT background would be able to use it, but a regular person who just knows more or has always been dealing with Microsoft Word might find it difficult to use that system.

Users need skills to work with this solution and also need to have some foundation of why those technical integrations and cross-referencing have to be done in such a way through systematization, which makes it difficult and not straightforward through the visibility of the user interface.

I have about two years of experience with Polarion Requirements.

I would rate the stability of this solution around seven out of ten; it's pretty stable.

I would rate the scalability of this solution around six or seven out of ten, since the solution is quite scalable in terms of the technical part. The data structure and database have the ability to put and dump everything inside, which is very scalable. 

When it comes to the user interface, it can be confusing; it's similar to using a mobile phone. If you use an Apple mobile phone, the steps are pretty easy or straightforward, however, if you use something an older Android, it can be more confusing to get all the functions to be revealed.

I would rate the quality of technical support from Siemens around six out of ten. They have good prompt response, yet the quality of support is not as good.

Neutral

Before Polarion Requirements, I have never used any other solutions.

The initial setup of Polarion Requirements is complex. You need to understand some of the guidelines and standards such as INCOSE, EARS and everything beforehand. You need to understand your own technical requirements and how to approach them. That was not given or was not well-defined during the initial setup of the system, and we struggled for a while.

We did the deployment in-house, however, we called Siemens for a two-week training period, and everything was done in-house.

In terms of value added, since we only use Polarion Requirements for the last two years, we captured a little bit of the value; however, we haven't actually done a final overall performance check yet. We did a preliminary one in the first year, and definitely, we saved a lot of man hours, but we have not seen any real major improvement yet, mainly because many teams are still learning and trying to grasp the system. The first part of putting data in was easy, but integrating, reviewing, and approving seems to be a bottleneck due to the user interface issue.

We definitely evaluated other options before choosing Polarion Requirements. There were a few other requirements software that we were looking at, and in the end, we decided that Polarion Requirements, based on the evaluation by the team, should be able to meet most of our requirements that we had spelled out.

Based on my experience with a rating of six out of ten, I would probably not recommend Polarion Requirements currently, unless your organization is pretty IT savvy and advanced, and you know what to do; in that case, it could be a good solution. But for an organization which is not fully into IT, it may not be the best solution; it depends on the situation.

Regarding AI capabilities in Polarion Requirements, we tried the AI functionality they had a year back, but it didn't seem to have all the LLM functionality that we have seen in other software. It's still basic; they tried to do searching and trying to integrate the functionality, but if you want to do more contextual integration, that seems to be yet to be satisfied on the results.

My company mainly utilizes the product for documenting internal standards, guidelines, and requirements. Currently, we're focusing on using it for internal purposes, but the vision is to expand its usage to include contract requirements and tracking functionalities. While we're not there yet, it has proven effective for managing our internal documentation needs.

Multiple team members can collaborate on a document, making it easy to track changes, add comments, and work on drafts collectively.

Polarion Requirement needs to have a feature where we can track changes and compare documents. Currently, we do it manually. 

I have been using the product for a year and a half. 

The tool is stable. I rate it an eight out of ten.

My company is big, and the Polarion Requirement works fine. 

I have never used technical support before. 

Before Polarion Requirement, we used Microsoft Word and SharePoint. 

I rate the tool's deployment a six out of ten. I work in a big company. Hence, at least a dozen resources should have been involved in the deployment process. 

I rate the product a seven out of ten. 

We begin by drafting their requirements. However, we have only attempted to employ them for document management, even though they are meant for a requirements management system. Now, we have been attempting to use Polarion in its current manner to oversee the entire process, from requirements to calls. I began using Polarion, primarily for creating demos during the pre-sales phase. However, in my current company, I'm working on enhancing our project delivery methodology.

We encountered numerous challenges, such as issues with requirements, project management, timing, and planning. The main problem with Polarion at the outset, I believe, was our limited understanding of the planning phase. During that time, we were more focused on change management related to requirements. Recognizing the importance of planning has been a key realization for us.

Another mistake we made was not comprehending the need to document these requirements to manage all the work items effectively. Now, we understand the significance of this documentation. As a result of these insights, we have started to see a growing number of competitors from Polarion in this field. One potential improvement could be enabling Polarion to export work items not just to Microsoft Office but also to other office tools

I have been using this Polarion Requirements since 2018 and we have used it in 5 products.

It is a stable product.

We haven't utilized technical support because we are presently a partner with similar access, and we have never submitted an issue to the support center.

The setup was quite straightforward for us. Our problem lay in not investing enough in training to fully comprehend the functionality, steps, and phases required for this implementation. I believe that once we understand these aspects, the implementation process will be quite straightforward. Perhaps the difficulty arises from translating our current project implementation methodology into the configuration process. Another mistake we made was attempting to perform this translation internally. I believe we should undergo training for this installation process.

I believe the cost is subjective. It seems a bit pricey, but it depends on your perspective. To provide some context, I compared the prices with GitLab and Jira. Unfortunately, I couldn't find Jira's prices. However, GitLab costs around 40 euros, and DeepLab, which I recently discovered, also falls in a similar price range. I'm not sure about DeepLab's features or interface improvements, as they might have been implementing requirements management over the past six months. In contrast, Polarion costs around 50 to 60 euros based on the 2021 prices I have. While it may seem a bit expensive, it's worth considering whether the additional investment, perhaps around 68 euros per user, is justified. It might appear costly at first glance, but it's essential to acknowledge that it can greatly streamline your work processes.

I would rate the product 9 out of 10.

From my perspective, I grasp the Polarion solution quite effectively. It appears to be the most suitable interface for me in terms of document management. Utilizing these documents to meet all the necessary criteria is crucial. Additionally, it's essential to consider the requirement of one license per user. Because, by addressing this aspect, you can automate a wide range of tasks, including those related to value plans and consumer rates, among others.

Polarion is used for Application Lifecycle Management. It supports various functions such as requirements management, testing, etc.

In my opinion, Polarion Requirements' most beneficial feature is the ability to manage specifications within a work-like document that functions as a work item. Its collaboration features have worked very well and have been very useful. We can easily exchange information with the testing team, the business, and with DevOps. 

In my opinion, the main area for improvement in Polarion Requirements is its user interface. It should be easier for engineers to understand how it works, as many features are not very easily understandable for end-users. 

I have been working with the product for five years. 

I rate the product's stability as seven out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability an eight out of ten. 

The tool's support is good. 

Positive

I rate the tool's deployment a six out of ten. It's not that easy, indeed. I am a functional IT resource, and it was not easy because sometimes the features are difficult to understand. It becomes a bit clearer when we have to explain them to end users. 

The tool's deployment depends on what you include in the deployment phase because it can be very fast if it's just the technical deployment. However, once we roll out all services, it can take up to two years.

I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten. 

My clients are big businesses. I rate the tool's integration with existing tools and workflows an eight out of ten and the overall solution an eight out of ten.

I'm a test engineer and expert, and I generate test cases and protocols from customer requirements for the company. Based on the requirements, I facilitate test runs and execution. The tool proves valuable for creating comprehensive test reports.

The design is good, and the solution is especially great for organizing folders effectively. We utilize Polarion for generating reports, which is a valuable feature.

Generating tables and establishing traceability can be challenging at times. For instance, I must select individual test cases to generate a test run if I want to test protocol for a specific customer requirement. This poses difficulties. Additionally, an area for improvement is in bulk editing. Currently, customization in bulk editing is impossible for more than a hundred test cases, whether for an automation tool or manual tests. So, if you want to go beyond a hundred cases, you have to select manually. This makes it a rigorous task. The usability of the solution should also be improved.

I have been using the solution for the past two years. Currently, I’m working with the latest version of the solution.

The solution is stable. I rate it an eight out of ten.

The solution is scalable. Over a hundred people, including testing engineers, requirement analysts, and test managers, are using the solution daily in our company. I rate it a seven out of ten.

I have worked with DOORS. I switched to Polarion because I changed my workplace, and that was being used. However, my previous company later switched to Polarion for its enhanced traceability features.

The deployment process is managed by a designated person responsible for a specific module. So, there are many carrying out the deployment.

The deployment was handled in-house.

It's a good product. If Polarion improved its usability a little, I’d rate Polarion Requirements a ten out of ten. However, right now I rate it a seven out of ten.

I primarily use Polarion Requirements for industrial servicing.

Polarion Requirements' most valuable features are link tracing, book entry, and sequence training features.

Integration can be a little tricky if you're not aware of basic computer science or programming language. Polarion Requirements would be improved with the ability to import configurations from other platforms. In the next release, Polarion Requirements should add features for risk analysis and the FMA.

I've been using Polarion Requirements for a year.

We have not faced any stability issues with Polarion Requirements so far.

I would rate Polarion Requirements' scalability seven out of ten.

Polarion's technical support team is knowledgeable and responsive.

Positive

We chose Polarion Requirements because it had the best metrics and results in our gap analysis.

Polarion Requirements is a little pricey.

I would recommend Polarion Requirements as it makes test engineering easier. I'd rate Polarion Requirements seven out of ten.

Our primary use case is to track the requirements, user stories, software solution designs, and deliveries for our team-centered projects.

I would say there is value in how powerful, configurable, and user-friendly it is. A variety of file types can be managed and it is easy to report.

One thing to consider is increased flexibility in terms of workflow configuration.

I have been using Polarion Requirements for the past year.

The stability is very solid and high performing.

My experience with technical support is very responsive. I would say that from a general perspective if I were to compare Siemens to a Dassault system, the previous PLM providers that we have been working with in the past, the production support, and all of the teams that manage the productions are much more reactive. They are attentive to the impact that their software may have on production. If for any reason there is a problem, they immediately need to react and come up with action plans because they know that the businesses are running on their tools. I would say, top class.

The initial setup was a little more complex than expected.

It depends on how deep they want to go into that mechanism. They really need to commit to using the tool for all of their requirements gathering. What you can do, if you absolutely must do some of the things outside the tool, is use the link field and put the hyperlink to something else outside the tool, which is feasible. But if they do that, they need to pay attention that people will move out of the software to receive the rest of their information elsewhere. It has advantages and drawbacks. I would rate Polarion Requirements a nine out of ten.

Polarion Requirements is used in different industries like automotive, medical devices, and aerospace. It's primarily for managing requirements within an entire project. You can store requirements and have end-to-end traceability. 

This means you can track everything from initial customer requirements all the way down to system or subsystem requirements (even hardware or software components in the case of medical devices).

Polarion also provides LiveDocs and live reports, which can be configured once and then used to give top management an easy view of the product status or how the requirements process is going. 

It's a flexible tool where you can write requirements, track their statuses, and plan your entire software release.

My clients also use Polarion Requirements for traceability in their projects.

In requirements management, when customers or industries use traditional documents, they often have different versions and different types of requirements – functional, non-functional, and receptivity requirements.

Polarion lets us segregate these types. We call them "buckets" and "parts." This makes it easy to differentiate the requirement types and manage them in different versions. Plus, Polarion has version control, so you can track all of the changes.

Polarion also uses LiveDocs. This means end-users or suppliers always see the latest document version, but they can still access older versions if needed.

Finally, Polarion is a cloud-based collaboration tool. Anyone can see the status of requirements, who made changes, and compare different versions of requirement documents.

Other features, like baselining, allow you to see what changes were made between a baseline version and the latest live version. These types of functionalities help customers improve their requirement process.

One of the important functions of tracking progress is the workflow process. Also, there's the planning aspect. With planning, we can manage requirements based on releases or versions and easily track them.

Another important function is Work Items. Electronic signatures are also valuable. Stakeholders can sign directly without hard copies, and you can always access approved versions. It's easy to see how many times something was approved and the entire history of changes to enterprise requirements for each version. 

It's easy to integrate with workflows and with other requirements tools, like IBM DOORS or Jira. We can exchange data between applications seamlessly.

We use REST APIs and open APIs, so it's easy to integrate modifications. Knowing how to use the APIs and web services is key. And recently, they introduced SaaS API. That means we can easily connect to the data and create custom setups based on our needs.

We can easily customize it because of the web services and open APIs. Also, the APIs are available. We integrated Polarion with one of Siemens' products, Teamcenter, which is especially useful for automotive industries. There is an open API for integration with Jira as well, so for me, customization is a strong point.

At the product level, they are constantly improving things in the latest versions. 

The risk assessment functionality needs improvement, like FMEA risk management. 

Also, for requirement tracing, some additional alerts would be useful.

I have been using this product for seven years. 

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten because a few requirements still need improvement.

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. Compared to other tools, like Jira or PTC, Polarion is more scalable. It works similarly to the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office, tools I'm already familiar with. I haven't found any limitations with the work documents in Polarion yet.

It can work for medium-scale businesses as well. Siemens now offers a cloud-based SaaS model, making it easier to adopt without on-premises servers. 

This is a more cost-effective option than on-premises licenses, so even smaller companies could use the SaaS model if they can afford it.

The customer service and support are good. They respond quickly to issues or incidents and provide full support until the issue is resolved. They even follow up to make sure everything is working properly.

Positive

I have experience with Jira and a bit of experience with IBM DOORS.

For small-scale issue or bug tracking, Jira might suffice. But, if you want a single solution to track everything from customer requirements all the way through development and issue tracking, Polarion is the better choice.

The initial setup is not complicated. It has a very user-friendly interface. It's a web-based application, and the server installation is also straightforward. It's not difficult to install or use.

The pricing is in the middle-of-the-road. So, I would rate the pricing a five out of ten. 

They offer different license types based on user roles. For example, a manager who only needs to review things has a less expensive license than a developer with full functionality.

So, the pricing model is flexible. You don't have to pay for the full functionalities. And it's a one-time investment for the licenses. You purchase what you need and then can work with that.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

I definitely recommend it. In my opinion, it's easy to use and access. You don't need to install any external software. 

Since it's server-based (and can be cloud-based), it's simple to access.

We worked with the web interface.

There were some stability issues due to shared licenses. So sometimes people were dropped because of someone else using the same code. The interface was not very intuitive; some practice was needed.

I used the solution six months ago.

It is not a stable solution, as we had issues with shared licenses.

There was no way around to solve the issue with the license. We just worked offline and then tried to get the licenses back to save the work.

I rate the solution eight out of ten.