SRTK Manifesto

Vision

Software requirements toolkit (srtk) is a coherent set of unix-style tools for requirements management. Each tool has exactly one purpose.

Like each tool, the toolkit is limited in scope to strictly dealing with requirements.

Srtk is not complex. It is not loaded with dependencies. Thus it is portable, easy to install, and reliably consistent. Srtk does not use complex data formats. Requirements are stored in text files, using RFC822-style (e-mail headers) formatting. This is easy to parse, easy to edit and generate, friendly to diffing and merging, and friendly to source control systems. Files can include other files so that groups of requirements may be composed into larger systems.

The file format is simple -- here's a specification by way of a basic example:

Keyword: value
Keyword2: value
<blank line>
Text of requirement
^L (form-feed character separates requirements in a file)
... next requirement
^L
Include: some-other-file.rq
^L

Summary of tools

Related resources

See other open source requirements-related projects at Tigris.org.

I created srtk instead of contributing to one of those other projects because, at the start of a new (larger) project, I needed something simple that could be written quickly, added to incrementally, and I could start using right away.

These factors, and other philosophical ideas about The Right Way for Software Tools to Behave led to the creation of srtk.