Welcome to REQCHECKER™ User Manual

What is REQCHECKER™?

Requirements traceability refers to the ability to follow each requirement across the entire project lifecycle — from its initial capture through design, development, testing, and final delivery. It ensures that every requirement is properly addressed, verified, and connected to related documents or activities.

Key benefits include:

Enhanced quality and compliance
Easier change impact analysis
Clear evidence of requirement fulfilment (for audits, certifications, etc.)
Lower risk of overlooked or misinterpreted requirements

REQCHECKER™ supports traceability in a non-intrusive way by working directly with your existing documents and processes. Whether you're handling specifications, bids, or quality procedures, it lets you analyse and trace requirements without changing your tools or workflows.

What non-intrusive means? There’s no database, no external uploads, and no disruption to your current setup. You keep full control over your documents. If you stop using REQCHECKER™, your project remains intact — only the reporting and traceability features are gone. As a lightweight, stateless desktop application, REQCHECKER™ simply reads your documents in place (on your network or in collaborative platforms) and generates traceability reports from them.

REQCHECKER™ and REQCHECKER™ Add-in for Microsoft Word implements 4 main features:

flowchart LR classDef style_blue fill:#017cb7, color:white; Authoring(Authoring<br>features) click Authoring "#authoring-features" "Read more.." Authoring:::style_blue Capturing(Capturing<br>features) click Capturing "#capturing-features" "Read more.." Capturing:::style_blue Checking(Checking<br>features) click Checking "#checking-features" "Read more.." Checking:::style_blue Reporting(Reporting<br>features) click Reporting "#reporting-features" "Read more.." Reporting:::style_blue Authoring ==> Capturing Capturing ==> Checking Checking ==> Reporting

Requirements management system

REQCHECKER™ is an analysis tool and not a complete requirements management system. It is used in conjunction with other software to manage requirements, mainly:

Microsoft WORD and REQCHECKER™ REQCHECKER™ Add-in for Microsoft Word: for requirements authoring. Other formats are supported like Apache OpenOffice Writer.
Apache Subversion: to manage the reference document set, change history, multi-user access, and lock on changes. Other sharing solutions are possible, for example Microsoft OneDrive / Sharepoint, Google Docs, Redmine, Jira etc.

Who is REQCHECKER™ for?

REQCHECKER™ is ideal for anyone who needs to ensure that a document fully addresses a defined set of requirements or rules — and who must maintain traceability even as source documents evolve.

Whether you're a project manager, buyer, sales representative, engineer, quality specialist or trainer, REQCHECKER™ helps you manage traceability across requirements, user stories, standards, training content, and more.

With REQCHECKER™, it’s back to basics:

Get started in just minutes
Work with your existing documents and processes
Avoid the cost and complexity of heavyweight tools
Minimise errors and clarify your deliverables
Reduce project risks and build customer confidence

The Future of Requirements Management — AI-Powered, Secure, and Local

REQCHECKER™ takes a bold leap forward by integrating multiple AI technologies — all running locally:

Embeddings vectors capture the meaning of each requirement, reveal their relationships, and detect potential duplicates.
HDBSCAN + PCA clustering algorithms automatically establish a typology of requirements, serving as a foundation for several advanced features — including the grouping of related requirements to simplify their management.
A local LLM friendly names these groups (available in version 1.15), explains duplicates (coming soon), and detects contradictions (coming soon).

Combining these advanced technologies locally — embeddings, clustering, and large language models — is a true technical achievement. It requires managing heavy computations, optimizing memory, and ensuring efficient multilingual processing without relying on external services. It also eliminates the cost of external AI subscriptions to cloud platforms.

AI-Powered, Secure, and Local

But beyond the technology itself lies a deeper shift in how engineering evolves with AI. As AI becomes increasingly capable of automating design, coding, and analysis, one task remains inherently human: defining the need. AI systems cannot interpret what is not written. Clear, structured, and traceable requirements are therefore more vital than ever — they are the bridge between human intent and AI execution.

While AI can assist by suggesting missing links, detecting inconsistencies, or organizing complex sets of requirements, formal and deterministic traceability remains essential. Probabilistic reasoning alone cannot provide the level of rigor required in critical domains such as safety, security, or compliance. With REQCHECKER™, AI acts as a trusted assistant — not a black box — working in perfect harmony with formal traceability.

REQCHECKER™ protects you data

By design, REQCHECKER™ reads your information (documents, ticketing system, etc.) from the secure location you are already using, without modifying it. As it is based on the ‘stateless’ principle, it does not store your documents nor send them over the Internet. Only the generated report contains part of the information. This report is a local file that you can easily secure.

REQCHECKER™ FREE, REQCHECKER™ TRIAL, REQCHECKER™ PRO and REQCHECKER™ EXPERT do not require internet or network access to operate. REQCHECKER™ TEAM only requires access to the SGLM management server which can be deployed in your sub-network. REQCHECKER™ is not exposed to any direct attack via the internet. Fully local AI capabilities ensure complete data privacy, as no information ever leaves your computer.

REQCHECKER™ is developed based on Java technology. It offers several key advantages in terms of cybersecurity, including platform independence that reduces platform-specific vulnerabilities (such as those that might exploit differences in system APIs), automatic memory management and bytecode checking that reduce the risk of memory-related attacks (buffer overflows, stack overflows etc), and active security updates that patch vulnerabilities.

In short, REQCHECKER™ does not expose your data any more than native reader software such as Microsoft Word.

Authoring features

Authoring add-in for Microsoft WORD

Authoring Add In

REQCHECKER™ Add-in for Microsoft Word provides powerful features for easily search, display, author and cover requirements directly in Microsoft® WORD application:

Requirement creation with template, custom attributes, automatic ID creation.
Full text search, including exact term search and error type filter.
Integrated requirement viewer including highlight of search results and dynamic navigation between documents.
Coverage creation with automatic version management.

Capturing features

REQCHECKER™ is able to capture (i.e. extract) requirements directly where they are written.

It extracts both the requirements, their attributes and where they are covered.

It allows the same document to declare and cover requirements. It is therefore not necessary to specify which document covers what. This flexibility allows, for example, to cover use cases of a chapter of a specification by functional requirements.

Multiple data sources

Requirements and coverages capturing

REQCHECKER™ is able to capture (i.e. extract) requirements in several formats:

Microsoft WORD documents
PDF documents
Google Docs
Microsoft EXCEL documents
Microsoft POWERPOINT documents
Source code for dozens of programming languages
XML (in comments lines)
and more.

Extract requirements with 5 methods

Heading capturing mode

Each document or data source can be read with any of the following 4 requirement extraction methods:

from writing pattern (Syntax mode) to find and extract requirements information. The statement is declared by enclosing markers. For example <REQ_0123> declares the requirement REQ_0123. You can use either simple wildcards or powerful regular expressions.
from chapter numbers (Heading mode) to automatically create requirements from heading numbers of MS Word or Adobe PDF document. The ID looks like FIL1§1.1.
from both (Syntax+Full mode), inthis case the full text is parsed, including requirements and text outside requirements.
from patterns in each sentence (Auto mode), e.g. "The system should shut down when the sensor measures a temperature above 50°C."
from direct reading of a table in a database (Database mode)

Extract custom tags

Heading capturing mode

Manage your own requirement attributes (tags) for requirements as well for coverages. 5 types are available:

yes/no
text on one line
text on several lines
list of elements
content of a table cell.

Their values are extracted from statements and coverages and can be reviewed in Coverage Matrix. Custom tags register information directly inside a document, e.g. #C for a coverage comment, #TODO for a reminder, #Type for a requirement type, #Status etc.

Extract coverages

Coverage by syntax

Coverage can be declared everywhere in documents using a simple syntax with markers, for example <<REQ_0123>> or <<RFP§4.5.7>>.

Coverage can be a fragment: the requirement must be covered several times to be fully covered. For example a need like All reports must display the company logo. shall have a fragment coverage in each test of each report. It can be also deleted, uncovered, not applicable, or inconsistent (orphans, multiple statements etc.).

The fragment weight can be quantified, for example <<REQ_0123>> #Fragment 70% coverage tag can be included in another requirement (node) or everywhere in a document (node leaf). In this way requirements can be chained on multiple levels.

Checking features

Traceability

Check the requirement traceability between different levels, e.g.: system / sub-system / component, need requirement / functional requirement etc.

10 errors are detected:

too many statements,
no statement,
orphan,
leaf but covered,
missing coverage,
wrong version,
wrong fragment quantification,
incomplete management,
validation failed,
cyclic coverage.

Impact analysis

Automatic impact detection

Check propagation of all requirement changes by using the version management: change input documents and REQCHECKER™ shows where your documents must be updated.

Every statement and coverage has a version. When the requirement is updated in a newer version, the statement remains inconsistent until it is updated too.

When no version is available, REQCHECKER™ computes an automatic numeric print code from requirement title and text. By using this code in the coverage, REQCHECKER™ automatically computes the impact analysis of any modification on source documents.

Proofreading

REQCHECKER™ runs several checks on requirements title and text to increase the consistency and ease of reading:

Blacklist finds all ambiguous (most, often, at … level) or forbidden (ASAP, TBC, TBD etc.) terms and expressions.
Metrics checks several metrics that make text hard to read or ambiguous: too many negations, too long sentences, too many coordination conjunctions (and, or, for etc.), subordinate conjunctions (after, though, unless, etc.), link adverbs (furthermore, unlike, besides) and logical relation adverbs (because, since, in order that etc.).

The rules can be customized.

The language used by checks is dynamically selected to match the main language of the analysed document. Supported languages for proofreading are French, German, and English.

Cross document rules

REQCHECKER™ implements a simplified vision of traceability in which the objective is that each requirement / artifact must be covered at least once and completely. It allows coverages to be present in any document, and even the declaration and coverage of a requirement within the same document. This feature allows you to control how requirements are covered in different documents, for example by ensuring that all high-level requirements are covered in both the software architecture AND the low-level requirements. This type of control is necessary to implement the V-model rules of IEC 62304, DO178C, ISO 26262, etc.

Reporting features

REQCHECKER™ generates several reports to meet different needs:

The Coverage PDF Report is a complete report in PDF format designed to be easily disseminated to other stakeholders in your projects.
The Markdown Report is a complete report in MARKDOWN structured text format designed to be easily read and modified on any type of operating system. It can be displayed in HTML format in a browser.
The Verification Table exports the whole repository in an EXCEL spreadsheet designed for review. It can be used as a review sheet or to generate a test campaign report. After completion, the sheet can be updated from new version of the requirements repository, without losing any information. It presents the differences between the old and the new repository.
The Coverage Matrix is the interactive traceability matrix between your different documents designed to efficiently identify and correct problems.
The Java Enum Export exports requirement information under Java enum format. It allows to reference requirements directly from Java language, for example as link in JavaDoc source code.
The Eclipse Content Assist Export exports requirement information under Eclipse IDE internal format. C++ and Java developers can use the Eclipse IDE content assistant (CTRL+SPACE) to select the requirement and insert coverage.
The XML Export allows output interoperability with another tool : the XML result can be processed for a conversion to another format.

License comparison

REQCHECKER™ comes with two complementary softwares: SGLM License Manager and REQCHECKER™ Add-in for Microsoft Word. SGLM License Manager and REQCHECKER™ Add-in for Microsoft Word are freeware.

	FREE	PRO	TEAM	EXPERT
Authoring Features
REQCHECKER™ Add-in for Microsoft Word	✓	✓	✓	✓
Capturing Features
Extracts requirements using syntax, chapters, sentence patterns	✓	✓	✓	✓
Extracts from MS Word documents	✓	✓	✓	✓
Automatically groups related requirements	✓	✓	✓	✓
Extracts from software source files for many languages		✓	✓	✓
Extracts from MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, Open-Office Writer		✓	✓	✓
Extracts from PDF documents with TOC automatic recognition		✓	✓	✓
Filters result by position, title, style name or version		✓	✓	✓
Extracts custom attributes		✓	✓	✓
Extracts from collaborative tools (e.g. Redmine, Jira, Confluence)			✓	✓
Checking Features
Checks forbidden terms and expressions (FR EN DE)	✓	✓	✓	✓
Checks number of negation (FR EN DE)	✓	✓	✓	✓
Checks number of conjunction / adverbs (FR EN DE)	✓	✓	✓	✓
Automatic versioning of requirements	✓	✓	✓	✓
Checks sentence length	✓	✓	✓	✓
Automatic impact analysis	✓	✓	✓	✓
Checks customization		✓	✓	✓
Reporting Features
Coverage PDF Report	✓	✓	✓	✓
Markdown Report	✓	✓	✓	✓
Verification Table		✓	✓	✓
Coverage Matrix		✓	✓	✓
Customizes PDF report		✓	✓	✓
Java Enum Export		✓	✓	✓
Eclipse Content Assist Export		✓	✓	✓
Miscellaneous Features
Detailed documentation in English	✓	✓	✓	✓
French, German and English GUI	✓	✓	✓	✓
Not tied to a hardware for life			✓	✓
Use on virtual computer			✓	✓
Software API to add your own data source module				✓
Software API to add your own checking module				✓
Software command line API				✓