REDO: RED Online
Our flagship tool RED is a classic desktop stand-alone application, which is fine for most of the tasks of requirements engineers. There are also other settings, though, where this kind of tool has disadvantages.
- Think of visiting a client and finding out about a new requirement, and want to enter it then and there.
- Or consider the need to consult external experts to validate an existing requirements specification - often, that person will not want to install a tool.
- A similar case arises when we need to communicate with collaborators that are at another site.
In these cases, an online solution to access and update a RED specification would be preferable. It could be operated with any mobile device and without installation. That is what RED Online ("REDO") does.
Technology
REDO is a reimplementation of most of RED's editing features in JavaScript. REDO is a JS full-stack application based on METEOR and thus also mongoDB .
Availability
Currently, we are still testing and improving REDO, so it is not publicly available at this time. We hope this will be the case in spring or early summer of 2016. As RED, REDO will be open source under the Apache Licenses 2.0.
Having said that, a preview is available here. A final decision on where and how REDO will be hosted is still pending.
Features and limitations
REDO is fully online in the sense that every change any user makes will be relayed to all other users within seconds. This is great for concurrent work, but there is also a risk of overwriting each others' changes: REDO is not safeguarding against concurrent updates to the same unit.
On the other hand, REDO does not provide any of the advanced features of RED such as visual modeling, fragment stitching, reporting, consistency checking, productivity enhancement, release planning and so on. Of course, REDO does not require the version control features of RED.
Probably the greatest restriction of REDO is that, at present time, it is not integrated with RED: RED cannot import the JSON files REDO creates, and REDO cannot parse the XML that RED saves.
