Polarion Requirements Reviews

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.

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.

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.