Skip to main content

A tour of REQQA

When you'd read this: just after your first sign-in, when the navigation bar is still unfamiliar and you want a map of where everything lives.

REQQA is organised around one application at a time. Almost every screen you visit acts on the application currently selected in your profile, and the top navigation bar groups the tools you'll use to build and analyse it: Requirements, Stories, Manage, Static Analysis, Backlog, and Help. This page walks the main areas in roughly the order you'll meet them, so you build a mental model before diving into any single task.

tip

Everything below assumes you already have an application selected. If you don't, start with Your first application and come back here.

My Application — the hub​

The My Application link (top-left of the navigation bar) is your home base. It opens the Application Dashboard: a single page showing the selected application, its mission, and a set of at-a-glance statistics — how many requirements exist, how many have been analysed, the state of the latest mission analysis, and outstanding issues. From here you can jump straight to editing the application, analysing or regenerating from its mission, or re-indexing its glossary terms. If your profile has no application selected, REQQA quietly redirects you to the applications list so you can pick one.

See Manual: Introduction for how the application sits at the top of everything, and The mission for why the mission statement matters so much.

Requirements — list, hierarchy, and detail​

The Requirements menu is where most of the work happens. List Requirements gives you the flat, filterable table of every requirement in the application. Manage Requirements Hierarchy opens the tree view, where requirements are arranged parent-to-child beneath the mission so you can see structure and decomposition at a glance. Clicking any requirement opens its detail page — the full text, its template-driven sections, version history, and the Analyse tab where you run DeFOSPAM analysis against it. The same menu holds Add a Requirement, Import from CSV, and Requirement Templates, which define the section structure new requirements inherit.

Stories — turning requirements into features​

The Stories menu lists the user stories generated from, or written against, your requirements. My Stories is the working list; each story opens a tabbed view where you can read it, analyse it, and review its issues. Stories are typically generated from a requirement (REQQA reads the requirement plus the inherited mission context to draft Gherkin-style stories), but they can also be written by hand. Analysis here applies the same DeFOSPAM technique to the Gherkin, finding faults in the scenarios.

The Glossary — shared vocabulary​

Under the Manage menu, the Dictionary Manager is the home of your application's glossary: the defined terms that give your requirements a consistent, agreed vocabulary. REQQA indexes the terms it finds across the mission, requirements, and stories, so a definition written once is recognised everywhere. Recognised terms are subtly underlined throughout the app and show their definition on hover. The same area surfaces Term Suggestions — candidate terms REQQA has spotted that you may want to define.

Releases — slicing the work​

A Release is a named slice of your requirements — the set you intend to specify, review, and build together. In the underlying model a release is backed by a scope object that requirements are assigned to, but in the interface you'll always see the word Release. Releases let you focus analysis and reporting on the requirements that matter for a given delivery, rather than the whole application at once.

The Job Queue — watching the work run​

Analysis, story generation, and synthesis don't run instantly — they call an AI model and can take a while, so REQQA runs them as background jobs. The Job Queue (under the Manage menu) is a read-only view of what's queued, running, and recently finished for your current application: requirement and mission analyses, story and requirements generation, and synthesis runs all appear here with their status. When you kick off an analysis and the page tells you it's been queued, this is where you watch it progress.

note

The Job Queue shows the latest runs per status, not an unbounded history — recent finished and failed jobs are kept so you can see outcomes without scrolling forever.

The "?" Help button — help for the page you're on​

On every signed-in page you'll see a rounded Help button fixed to the bottom-right corner, marked with a question-mark icon. Click it and a popover opens with help written specifically for that page — what it's for, the context you need, and what to watch out for. Where a page has tabs, the help follows the tab you're viewing. Many popovers also link out to the fuller guides on this help site (the same site you're reading now). Press Escape, click the close control, or click outside the popover to dismiss it.

tip

If a page shows "No help content yet", that screen simply hasn't had its help written — the button still works everywhere else. The most-used screens are all covered.

Where to go next​

You now have the lay of the land. A sensible first journey is: write a strong mission, add a few requirements, analyse one, and watch it run in the Job Queue. The how-to guides below take you through each step.