While Contour is relatively new - we just released this year, it’s already gained significant traction in the requirements management space. We’ve heard quite a bit from our customers about the benefits they are seeing. What is especially interesting to us are the benefits customers experience that we didn’t anticipate. It’s great to see that our vision of an easy to use but functionally solution is making life easier for real world software teams.
I’ll be posting on these benefits over the next few days…
1. Project Teams that Truly Understand Project Objectives
We’ve been told that the immediate benefit to using Contour is the entire team gets in sync with the project. As the team starts entering requirements into a shared repository that’s visible across all project roles great discussions start taking place. People have told us that these early discussion and clarification are helping create a better, broader understanding of key requirements and reduce confusion and mistakes later in the project. We’re often told how costly mistakes are to fix once code has been written, or a product released so it’s great to see these caught early in an iteration when it’s just a text change.
2. Find Stuff Fast
One of the biggest pains in large software projects is the number of artifacts and “stuff†created by the project team. Requirements, design documents, notes, test cases, research, story cards can quickly become a nightmare to organize. Project teams are using Contour as the central hub of the project, using Contour to store not only project requirements, but all types of project artifacts. Some teams store items as attachments, others link to items in Wiki’s, Intranets and document management systems. The benefit comes from creating relationship links between items. Users can immediately see how the item they are working on relates back to high level requirements as well as other project artifacts – and access those items with a click.
More to come…