RAVEN Professional provides a robust desktop environment for defining and validating business requirements then generating the associated requirements specifications. Based on Microsoft Windows with a familiar Office look & feel, RAVEN Professional allows business analysts and other requirements professionals to quickly capture business needs in term of the business processes, business use cases and key user functions to be performed. Leveraging the power of RAVEN, analysts can quickly identify the process inconsistencies that can lead to flawed requirements, wasted development efforts, and lost business value.

RAVEN Professional supports requirements definition across multiple projects and can work standalone or as a connected application to the RAVEN Collaboration Space. Working in a connected mode RAVEN Professional enables project sharing and team-based editing with automated version management through a simple but powerful check-in/check-out feature. It also allows you to define and conduct requirements reviews with business and IT stakeholders to quickly reach consensus on the process improvement or application development work to be done.

Once a project has been created users write process and use case narratives that are automatically converted to visual diagrams by the RAVEN Language Engine. Defined processes can be broken down into any number of sub-processes with links between them to enable top-down business modeling. A built-in process specification checker automatically identifies any logical errors, flow breaks, undefined data objects or ambiguous terms that could constitute missing requirements. These can be quickly corrected through use of a special RAVEN feature that highlights and offers suggested changes.

RAVEN Business Glossary
RAVEN Professional also includes a powerful Business Glossary that helps ensure everyone is “speaking the same language” when it comes to defining requirements. The RAVEN Business Glossary is automatically referenced by the Language Engine as it analyzes and visualizes your requirements text. You can also take the terms identified by the Language Engine to add to the glossary and build a shared vocabulary as you go. Glossaries can be defined as project-specific or created for use on multiple projects. Your glossaries can also be stored on the RAVEN Collaboration Space server so they can be shared and accessed across your company.

RAVEN Collaboration Space
The RAVEN Collaboration Space is a requirements collaboration platform based upon Microsoft SharePoint that complements RAVEN Professional by enabling centralized storage, version control, and group editing of RAVEN projects. It also facilitates rapid requirements validation by allowing requirements packages to be sent to project stakeholders for review and signoff. These review packages can be accessed via a browser using the RAVEN Web Access client software. This software allows reviewers to enter comments which are then returned to the requester where they can be examined within RAVEN Professional for incorporation as appropriate.

Compare to RAVEN Express