RQA customer-managed architecture

The IBM Engineering Requirements Quality Assistant (RQA) application provides a widget where users can check the quality of their requirements with a simple click.

In IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS® Next (DOORS Next), the RQA widget is accessible from the mini dashboard. It works in its own IFrame and interacts with DOORS Next through an API.

RQA analysis workflow

The following diagram shows the architecture and the workflow of using RQA to analyze requirements.

Architecture diagram for RQA customer-managed
To analyze requirements, follow these steps:
  1. Log in to RQA by entering your Jazz® credentials. Three tokens are checked out from the IBM License Key Server.
  2. In DOORS Next, select the requirements to analyze. RQA sends the requirement text to the CLMNLU.
  3. Receive the requirements analysis results from RQA, including these parts:
    • Quality score
    • List of issues
    • Solutions to improve the requirement text
  4. In DOORS Next, you can run Jazz Reporting Service reports to summarize the RQA insight on the quality of the requirements.
  5. You can improve the requirements by using the advice from RQA and recheck the updated requirements as needed.
  6. You can also use Teach Watson™ to enhance the analysis model for your situation by sharing feedback on the requirements guidance that RQA provides.

Applications deployed in the customer private network

  • DOORS Next: Requirements management tool.
  • Jazz Authorization Server: Used for authentication, authorization, and Single sign-on (SSO). Users can log in to the RQA widget in DOORS Next and the RQA administrator dashboard by using the SSO credentials.
  • IBM License Key Server: Used for the token management when users analyze the DOORS Next requirements.

RQA components

  • RQA operator

    RQA operator is used to deploy RQA and IBM Redis in the OpenShift® cluster, and manage the RQA services.

  • DNG widget

    RQA widget is installed as an OpenSocial gadget in DOORS Next that is used to analyze requirements, and view the scores.

  • CLMNLU

    Completes authentication with Jazz Authorization Server. Accepts scoring requirements from the RQA widget. Manages the license tokens check out and check in process by communicating with the IBM License Key Server.

  • Admin dashboard

    RQA administrator dashboard. The RQA primary administrator (Owner) and RQA administrator can access the RQA administrator dashboard.

  • Score processor

    Uses IBM Watson® Natural Language Processing (NLP) library for requirements text analysis. The results are combined with business rules to compute scores for the requirements.

  • Service broker

    Used for default tenant and configuration management.

  • Token license service

    Token-based licensing system that is made available by IBM Common Licensing and Flexera. See Hardware and software requirements. When users log in to the RQA widget, tokens are checked out from the IBM License Key Server. When users log out from the RQA widget, the tokens are checked back in to IBM License Key Server. See Checking DOORS Next requirements with RQA customer-managed.

  • IBM Watson Natural Language Processing (NLP)

    IBM Watson Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the embedded library that helps you detect potential ambiguities and generates real-time scores to assess the quality of requirements.

Databases

  • Redis

    Used as in-memory key-value database and cache. It is also used for publish-subscribe mechanism. For more information, see Creating RQA instance.

Security considerations

To learn more about the security considerations, see Security configuration and security hardening.