Polarion Requirements Reviews

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.

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 use it for requirements management.

Its flexibility and APIs are the most valuable.

Its user interface could be more user friendly. In addition, a lot of features are missing for test management. It should have the test case ordering feature.

I have been using this solution for a year and a half.

It is very stable.

It is scalable. You can add a lot of documents and the volume can be increased. We have 20 users. It has not really been adopted by the end users in our company, but this is not because of Polarion. This is related to the processes used in the company.

Technical support provided by the vendor in France was very good.

The technical setup was quite easy, but the process for setting up the required templates was complex. It took one day for us to deploy it.

It is expensive but not for what it is. It is just the right price for what it is. Its price is also similar to other solutions. 

Polarion should not be used for project management. It should be used for feasibility and requirement management. I would recommend to use it first to understand the features and then improve it. We wanted to improve and adapt it to our new requirements, but we never finished doing that. So, we are not able to release. It is a little bit hard to understand the features. That's why I am recommending to use it first. 

I would rate Polarion Requirements an eight out of ten. It is quite a good solution.

We are users of the product and I'm a systems engineer. We use the product to review and assign requirements we receive from customers. For now we have around 10 people using the solution. This may be increased in the coming months. 

The most valuable feature from my side would be the comparison composition but it doesn't work every time. If you have a long document and depending on the requirements it can sometimes time out. 

The product could be improved if the NTS solution worked more quickly, it's sometimes very slow. As a starting point, I'd like to see more requirements.

An additional feature for the next release would be to include a better import option from the data requirement solutions.

It's been more than two years since we implemented it. 

It is stable enough but if you would like to work with more requirement objects, then you will get timeouts. So it's stable, but not usable all the time.

I'm not sure that the scalability is good. I think we have enough room and memory on our server for it to work but it is too slow and we get timeouts. In that respect I don't think scalability is good. 

Technical support is fine, but they haven't solved our main problem. They are very direct and helpful, but couldn't solve the problem.

We previously used IBM DOORS which isn't exactly the same solution so it's difficult to compare, but for requirements management, it was better.

Initial setup was straightforward and took around two to three hours to deploy.

We purchased the product, so now we only have to pay for maintenance.

There were other products evaluated but I was not part of the team involved in that process. 

For anyone interested in the product I would suggest evaluating it in real conditions, with a specific project because of the issue with requirements.

I would rate this product a two out of 10.

We use this solution for systems engineering and department management.

We have a private-cloud deployment.

I like the way this solution is structured.

This solution has its limits. If we have more than one thousand work items in one live-book then it becomes almost unusable. For example, if you are trying to use a finance book then the loading times will be so long that you will time-out. This means that you have to sign in locally with a desktop and work on it there, although it is still slow. We spoke with Siemens about this and it cannot be improved. Even with more memory and more processors, it would still be the same.

This solution is not as handy as it could be, and it would benefit from improvements to the dashboards.

The import feature should be improved and made more like IBM Rational DOORS because there are too many things to set up.

The stability of this solution is rather good, but you have to consider that with the size limitation. If you have too many work items then you will not be able to work with it. 

This solution is scalable, but again it has limits. It can be scaled to a certain degree with new processors or memory, but it hits a point where it cannot scale anymore.

We have approximate ten people using this solution. They are all engineers.

The technical support for this solution has always been very helpful, but they are not always reachable. Sometimes, you have to wait for them.

There is another central support station for them, which is the Siemens Help Desk. You can put in a ticket and wait for an answer.  You may have to wait for several days or a couple of weeks before you get an answer. Sometimes it helps, and sometimes it doesn't. This wait time seems usual to me because there are other systems that have longer ticket processing times.

I have used IBM Rational DOORS, but I think that it is a bit old school. It is only usable from one perspective.

DOORS is better than this solution with respect to import and export because you don't have as many problems. For example, in this solution, you have to define all of the variable types and enumerations. You don't need to do this in DOORS.

The initial setup of this solution is pretty straightforward. It was not too complex.

The deployment took us three or four hours.

One engineer or administrator is suitable for deployment and maintenance.

Siemens assisted us with the implementation.

I also evaluated codeBeamer after we had adopted this solution. I think that it may be more modern and have more straightforward use cases.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to use it only for smaller projects.

I cannot think of any features that should be added, but some effort should be put into making the existing ones more usable.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

The primary use case involves developing custom products. We manage the requirements there.

The biggest improvement would be in the transparency we have now. We have very complex products. We make whole systems with difficult and diverse areas such as hardware, software, mechanical and printing, etc. To get the overview of all the requirements into a system, at that sizing, is the main advantage we have in the organization now.

The tool as a whole is very valuable. It isn't just one or two features. The combination of requirement and test management is very good for us.

The one thing I would mention is the license policy is a little bit difficult. For different roles, you will need different license models. That seems a little bit difficult for us. Especially when you introduce such a complex system, you want to know the right way is to do licensing. It's not clear what that best way would be. The solution will be here for a long time, and I just think it could be more clear.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is very scalable. We have around 50 licenses.

I've never reached out to technical support personally, but my colleagues have, and I have not heard any complaints, so I believe they're okay.

I have experience, from the very basic former engineering requirement, with Excel. It's not really acceptable for the complex items we have. We had another product which was not so good because of the user experience. We have chosen Polarion to make things easier.

This is a new product for us. We have to monitor the experience over a longer time to see if benefits will come to us.

We are using the on-premises deployment model.

My advice to others considering implementing the solution is that you should check your requirements for such a tool and process. Everything depends on the company. Our experience was to first fix the process of engineering requirements for vendor tools. We had to prepare for the introduction of the solution very well by creating a proper process. It's very important to go through everything beforehand.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

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.

It is easier to produce documents using the platform.

The platform's review process for the documents could be better.

We use the platform to provide regulatory documents for specific products.

It is a stable platform. I rate its stability an eight out of ten.

We never encounter any scalability issues during the deployment.

The technical support services need improvement.

Neutral

The difficulty level of the product's initial setup depends on the complexity of the specific project. It is simple for minimum configurations. But it is much more complex for multiple requirements. We encounter errors regarding the migration of data from the management tool. We have to ensure that it supports all the functionality from the previous solution. It is quite complicated. We develop our protocol to tackle it.

The product's price is high. However, it is an efficient solution for managing complex products.

We used IBM before. We switched to Polarion Requirements for better pricing.

I rate Polarion Requirements an eight out of ten.