TeamSpec by Personify Design is Shipping
Managing requirements is a hot topic with software development teams these days. I get a lot of questions from people about how to use TFS to manage requirements. When we think about requirements management, we break it into two parts - Elicitation/Capture and Analysis/Traceability. Today TFS really has no feature for elicitation - you can use standard work item entry forms but many business analysts consider that too clunky.
There are many ways to capture requirements. Some people prefer pictures, some to rely mostly on mind maps and some on Word documents. Today a new option for managing TFS requirements as Word documents is available. Personify's TeamSpec product allows you to capture requirements in Word, publish them to TFS and maintain a bi-directional synchronization between the document that people can read and the work items that the team is working on. I've seen a lot of demand for this functionality and expect this tool to be pretty popular. I encourage you to check it out if solving this problem is a priority for you.
You can read more about it on a Personify Design Blog post.
They've also produced some very nice videos you can watch to see the features in action.
Or you can test drive it your self with this trial download.
I look forward to hearing what you think of it.
Brian
