Blueprint Announces Blueprint Requirements Center 2010

Blueprint Unveils Major New Requirements Workbench to Control Risk and Reduce Rework in Today’s Distributed Reality

Toronto, ON -- June 15, 2009: Blueprint™, the market leading requirements software provider, today unveiled Blueprint Requirements Center 2010. At a time when software development teams are becoming increasingly global and distributed, this major release delivers requirements authors a complete requirements workbench, providing the industry’s most powerful and flexible solution for distributed requirements definition and stakeholder collaboration.

As part of Blueprint’s product planning process, major customers, prospects and analysts were consulted to identify best-of-breed new product capabilities to support today’s important
imperatives such as major application modernization initiatives, working with global and outsourced project teams, and a shift to increasingly agile development methodologies.

With the release of Blueprint Requirements Center 2010, Blueprint’s customers will have increased capabilities to eliminate requirements errors and misunderstanding, and to enable delivery of software projects faster, with less cost and risk, reduced rework, and greater user satisfaction.

"Blueprint Requirements Center enabled our team to achieve certainty in the requirements validation process with the business, which ultimately reduced costly rework and increased quality of deliverables being handed to our design team," said Dwayne Warner, Vice President of Strategic Automation at Carnival. "We look forward to exploring the business process and change tracking features being made available in the new release of Requirements Center."

New Capabilities for Requirements Definition
Blueprint Requirements Center 2010 provides a rich, traceable, and integrated platform that empowers requirements authors to define requirements assets including functional and non-functional requirements, business processes, use-cases, user interfaces, glossaries, data and rules.

Specifically, this release adds the following net-new capabilities:

Business Process Diagrams: With Business Process diagrams, requirements authors can graphically design sequential and parallel business process flows, complete with swim lanes, decisions, tasks and the ability to re-use common business processes. More than simply drawing diagrams, this editor enables requirements authors to associate tasks within these business flows to other requirements artifacts such as Use Cases, data, actors, UI mockups, business, functional and technical requirements, This alignment of business processes and software requirements allows Blueprint customers to provide additional requirements context and traceability to eliminate errors earlier in the requirements process.
Improved Traceability: Visual traceability has been extended throughout the product, allowing authors to create vital relationships as the requirements model is developed, improving verification and validation of requirements quality and completeness to prevent errors, and better enabling future change impact analysis.
Instant Search: New capabilities have been added to allow instant search across all requirements assets. A real-time search field delivers results as users begin to type their queries, reducing time spent searching for assets and improving authoring and review productivity.
Rich Text Support: Authors can now utilize rich text to more clearly communicate requirements, including support for tables, fonts, underlining, colors etc, further improving the efficiency of visual validation to eliminate requirements errors.

New Capabilities for Stakeholder Collaboration
Blueprint Requirements Center 2010 empowers all project stakeholders with the industry’s best visual solution for collaborating on requirements to achieve strong consensus, validation, and understanding. Capabilities of the new release include enhanced multi-aspect simulation, integrated comments, integrated track changes, custom document generation, and functional test scenario generation.

Specially, this release adds the following net-new capabilities:

Multi-Aspect Requirements Simulation: Enhanced, patented visual simulation technology, which enables stakeholders to visually walk through all requirements including user interfaces, process flows, data, roles, textural requirements and external reference materials, which are instantly synthesized and presented via easy-to-consume step-by-step walkthroughs to more easily gain consensus and validation, and ensure understanding.
Track-Changes: Modeled on the track-changes functionality of word-processing solutions, authors and stakeholders can now visually see edits and modifications in an intuitive, easy to read format either on-screen or as an automatically-generated document, ensuring changes are clearly understood, and improving review efficiency.
Custom Document Generation: Enhanced custom Microsoft Word document generation capability enables stakeholders to receive critical requirements documents in the customers own format, showing all requirements assets and track changes.

“Blueprint understands that proper requirements are a core and critical component of the global application lifecycle, and is changing the way organizations think about requirements definition,” said Theresa Lanowitz, co-founder and analyst of voke, inc. “Software has been built for decades on requirements that are narrative and text based. Blueprint is showing application lifecycle constituents – from the business analyst to the line of business – that requirements can be captured, translated, and built into functioning software.”

As part of Blueprint Requirements Center 2010, the company is launching a new version of the Blueprint Resource Center. The Blueprint Resource Center is a cloud-based collaboration system that provides self-training videos, an online knowledge base, searchable discussion threads, and a user community discussion forum.

Blueprint’s CMO, Matthew Morgan commented, “As we speak with our customers, be they financial services firms, or pharmaceutical companies, or cable service providers, one theme rings true across them all – increasingly, they are finding themselves with business stakeholders and development teams spread across the globe. Blueprint is well positioned to help these customers optimize their highly distributed resources to reduce cost and risk, and drive new revenue streams through new software capabilities.”

Blueprint Requirements Center 2010 will be generally available next quarter. For more information, please contact info@blueprintsys.com or visit http://www.blueprintsys.com.

About Blueprint
Named a Gartner “Cool Vendor” in Application Development, and winner of the 2009 Jolt Excellence Award in Design and Modeling, Blueprint is a global leader in requirements, delivering the industry’s first requirements workbench purpose built for today’s software requirements authors. Blueprint’s product Requirements Center™ empowers authors and reviewers to visually define, simulate, validate, and publish requirements for context and comprehension-rich collaboration with increasingly distributed and 3rd-party stakeholders– from the capture of business process definitions and textual requirements, all the way through more complex use cases, data, business rules, UI simulations and complete test case generation. Blueprint solutions eliminate requirements errors and misunderstanding, and enables companies to deliver software projects faster, with less cost and rework, and greater user satisfaction. Blueprint is a global provider, headquartered in Canada, and with presence, partners and customers in North America and Europe.

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ZAG Communications
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