Import Requirements

AI Assisted Requirements Importer (Previous Iteration)

Requirements engineering often begins with drafting of stakeholder requirements in documents like PDFs and Excel spreadsheets where data is not well structured. Extracting requirement data manually from these unstructured documents might be labor-intensive and error-prone, and in order to expedite the process of capturing requirements in Requirements & Systems Portal, you can leverage AI capabilities to import requirements from unstructured PDF, Excel, Word, and CSV files.

Accessing the Importer (Previous Iteration)

The AI Assisted Importer can be accessed from the Requirements Module () by clicking the  button at the top left of the page and select Create Requirement from the menu that appears. Alternatively, when the specification currently in view has no requirements, the importer can be accessed by clicking the Import button on the page.

Import Flow (Previous Iteration)

Once the importer is accessed, the Document Import window is presented. To continue with the AI Assisted Importer, click the  button.

On the next stage, you can upload a file of a supported type (*.pdf, *.docx, *.xlsx, or *.csv). To do this, drag and drop the file to the corresponding region of the window or click the select from your computer control to browse and select the file from the hard drive.

Once the file is successfully uploaded, its entry will be shown in the window. You can remove it from the window by clicking the  icon. Alternatively, drag and drop another file to the window to replace the existing file.

Click the  button to proceed. The importer will process the uploaded file. Once the process is finished, the extracted data will be presented as a table of suggested requirements. You can select the requirements you want to import by enabling checkboxes at the left of corresponding rows.

Click the  button to proceed. Once the import is finished, a confirmation window will appear.

Click the  button to return to the file uploading stage of the importer or click  to exit the importer.

Legacy Importer (Previous Iteration)

When accessing the Importer (learn more), you can choose to continue with the legacy import tool to upload structured requirements data. Also, the legacy importer is only available when the External Provider option is disabled in Requirements & Systems Portal settings by an admin.

The process guides you through three main stages: Specification, Upload, and Review. On completing a specification import, a summary is presented as well as the possibility to perform additional actions such as Valifying or importing other files. These stages and actions are described in the sections below.

Specification (Previous Iteration)

On this stage of the Import Wizard, you can define the target import specification:

• Use the Select a specification region in the left-hand side of the Import Requirements window to select an existing specification and, optionally its section.

• Use the Create a specification region in the right-hand side of the Import Requirements window to create a new specification (and also define the abbreviation and the block to be allocated to) without exiting the import wizard.

Click the required region to use the preferred method.

Upload (Previous Iteration)

On this stage of the Import Wizard, you can upload a file of a supported type. To do this, drag and drop the file to the right-hand side of the Import Requirements window or click the Drop file control to browse and select the file from the hard drive. Once the file is successfully uploaded, a notification is shown in the window.

Review (Previous Iteration)

On this stage the Import Wizard, you can review results of importing data from the uploaded file, configure file options, and map data from the file to requirement fields.

The Destination region of the Import Requirements window provides a visual indication of where the data will be imported (in terms of the specification or section).

The File options region provides the following options:

• Update requirements – when enabled, any existent requirements in the destination specification will be overwritten by substitution of the data (file data substitutes the data in the specification).

  • If the option is disabled and you are importing requirements whose Identifier already exists in the specification selected as the destination, Requirements & Systems Portal will add the suffix _import to the identifiers of the imported requirements to differentiate them.

  • If the option is disabled and you are importing requirements whose Identifiers already exist in the current project but not in the specification selected as the destination, Requirements & Systems Portal will add a warning icon to the identifiers that alert to a duplicate identifier in the same project.

  • If the option is enabled, blank values in the file being imported are supported, i.e., if a value in the file is blank, the value is removed from the requirement. This also applies to multi-select fields, such as Tags.

• Use header row – you can decide to use the header row of the uploaded file or to use a general reference header row provided by Requirements & Systems Portal (i.e., columns headers as A, B, C, etc.).

  Requirements & Systems Portal considers the Header row as the first row of any uploaded file.

• Sheet – in case of having a file with multiple sheets, you can select which sheet they want to import from.

• Starting row – you can select from which row of the imported file the data should start being collected to be inserted in Requirements & Systems Portal.

In the table at the bottom of the Import Requirements window, you view a preview of the uploaded file and map its columns to fields in Requirements & Systems Portal. This allows you to define how data from the file will correspond to specific fields in Requirements & Systems Portal by selecting the appropriate field in the Map To drop-down for each column. If the file contains headers identical to the default fields in Requirements & Systems Portal, these fields will be automatically mapped. However, you can override or adjust this automatic mapping if needed.

Execution Report (Previous Iteration)

Once the import process is finished and if the import is successfully completed, a message of success and the changes made and are displayed. If the import fails, a message of failure will be displayed. An example of a successful import is shown below.

Regardless of the importer being successful or not, you can re-import or to perform a new import by clicking Import new file (success) or Try again (failure), taking you back to the stage 1 (Specification).