While discussing an article about the top diagrams on Facebook, I was asked the question, "Why describe activities in the form of a diagram at all? Or more generally, why do we need to model? Because it somehow came out of the article as kind of obvious (when it really isn't)".

The question of why we need to model at all is left open for now. It is very broad. Broadly speaking, all of our intelligent (and not just intelligent) activity can be reduced to modeling.

And I will allow myself to rephrase the question about diagrams as I understand it: why do we need visual modeling in software development?

Periodically, articles appear on the Internet that compare the capabilities of requirements management software tools according to various criteria. I used to collect links to these articles, but it soon became apparent that they lose their freshness very quickly. Some products leave the market, others appear. The links themselves become "stale" and no longer point anywhere. Most importantly, ideas about what a Requirements Management System (RMS) should look like and be able to do change rapidly, and the evaluation criteria that once seemed relevant to the authors of these articles become obsolete.

Often, comparative reviews of requirements management tools are presented by companies that develop or sell such systems. For obvious reasons, they are always one-sided. Vendors and distributors shuffle the lists of criteria to put their product in a favorable light and obscure the advantages of their competitors. Almost always, these reviews are tables in which the green check marks indicating feature support fill only one column. Representing, of course, "their" product.

In general, I have not yet been able to find a sufficiently complete list of criteria for evaluating and comparing requirements management systems that can be applied to make an informed and unbiased choice of system. But from my own practice, as well as from studying all these articles and reviews, I have gradually come up with my own list, which I present here.