For any contributors who would like to edit the VNF Requirements document.

The enhanced toolkit that we are proposing has been developed to help users edit the VNF Requirements documents in a quicker fashion, as well as adding more functional capabilities of the this project. Outlined in this document are the added tools we are proposing:

Current Process

1. All Requirements manually maintained within RST files.

   1. For example:
      

      **Resource Description**
      -------------------------
      * R-77707 The VNF provider **MUST** include a Manifest File that contains a list of all the components in the VNF package.
      * R-66070 The VNF Package **MUST** include VNF Identification Data to uniquely identify the resource for a given VNF provider. The identification data must include: an identifier for the VNF, the name of the VNF as was given by the VNF provider, VNF description, VNF provider, and version.
      * R-69565 The VNF Package **MUST** include documentation describing VNF Management APIs. The document must include information and tools for:
      
      

2. No additional information about individual requirements is maintained.

   1. For example:
      
      1. Release
      2. Testable
      3. etc.
         
         

3. Requirements must be manually updated in multiple locations within the RST files.

   1. Requirements must be managed within the proper Chapter and Section, AS WELL AS within the Appendix.

Proposed Process

Objectives

This proposal aims to address the following objectives:

• Associate standard, structured metadata with each requirement to aid in a variety of use cases such as dependency tracking, searching, filtering, and reporting.
• Export requirements in a machine-readable format for use by other projects such as the VNF Validation Project.
• Generate different formats and outputs without duplicating requirement content (ex: appendices, tables, CSV files, etc.)
• Provide traceability within the document between requirements, test cases, and other items within the documents.

Approach

Requirements will still be maintained in the reStructuredText file, but they will be shifted to structured directives using the sphinxcontrib-needs extension.  This extension provides a way to meet each of the needs above.

Here is an example of a requirement after the conversion:

.. req::
	:id: R-01334
	:keyword: MUST
	:target: VNF
	:links_incoming: R-01335


	The VNF **MUST** conform to the NETCONF RFC 5717, Partial Lock Remote Procedure Call

These requirement definitions can be processed by the sphinxcontrib-needs extension and used in a variety of ways.

• Summary tables can be created via a needtable directive which provides a number of capabilities such as:
  • Export to a variety of formats such as CSV, Excel, and PDF
  • Filtering
  • Sorting
• All requirements can be exported as JSON file for consumption by other projects.
• By default metadata is hidden in the HTML document, but can easily be expanded to allow readers to learn more about the requirement.

Metadata Standards

The following table outlines the proposed standard metadata elements that will be associated with the requirements. This list may change over time.