Grant: Engage Grants Program

Global 2000 companies today have software systems and applications that have been in production for more than seven years. In fact, a great many, including financial institutions and insurance companies have systems that are 10+ years old. Many of these systems are now at an age where they need to be updated or replaced with a combination of hardware, software and new business requirements. Most of these organizations acknowledge that a) the initial requirements that captured what the system had to do and how it was to do it (i.e., that acted as baselines to create these systems) have been lost over time and b) that all that these companies currently have are tests that they run with upgrades or as patches are introduced. That is, tests (in the form of pass/fail code verifying some functionality of the system) are typically better maintained and evolved than requirements. Organizations faced with out-of-date requirements have expressed to Blueprint, a world leader in requirements capturing and management, significant interest in a tool that could reverse engineer their existing tests to some form of a requirements document. This is the company specific problem being addressed. In fact, Blueprint's ability to capture forgotten requirements that are solved in the older system and then determine if they need to be included in any new solution or specifically excluded would be a significant time and money saver for these customers (as such a tool would have a very high probability of reducing requirements and development re-work). Within Blueprint it is anticipated that ongoing development and support of this capability would create 4-6 additional full-time positions in the R & D organization and another 4 to 6 partial positions within the Training, Support and Services teams. There is also a high likelihood that numerous positions would also be created within Blueprint's partners for implementation and support of this highly innovative capability (which would constitute a significant contribution to the state-of-the-art).