The Tagging Upgrade Every BA and PM Needed

 

A Smarter Way to Organise Requirements: Introducing Flexible Tagging in OpenRose

Why This Feature Matters

Managing large sets of requirements often becomes messy — especially when teams need to group items by release cycle, business area, priority, location, or any other meaningful category. Traditional tools force rigid naming rules or limited classification options, making it harder to keep projects organised.

The new Tagging capability in OpenRose solves this problem by giving you a simple, expressive way to label and retrieve requirements using terminology that matches how your team actually works.

Teams benefit immediately because:

• Tags reflect real project language — not system‑imposed formats
• Search and filtering become faster and more meaningful
• Non‑technical contributors can add and update tags easily
• Tags remain consistent across baselines, exports, imports, and offline views
• Complex projects become easier to navigate and maintain

As the product now supports:
“alphanumeric tags, tags with spaces, hyphens, underscores, special characters, different languages, emojis, dates, currency symbols…”

This flexibility allows you to organise requirements in a way that feels natural and intuitive.

Introducing Flexible Tagging in OpenRose

OpenRose now allows you to apply multiple expressive tags to any requirement item. Tags can represent anything meaningful to your workflow — from release identifiers to business domains, customer segments, operational regions, or delivery milestones.

Key Capabilities

Apply, Edit, and Remove Tags Directly in the UI

Tags can be added or updated with a simple, clean interface.
The system automatically prevents duplicates and normalises unsupported characters to keep your tagging consistent.

Fully Supported in JSON Export and Import

Tags are included when exporting or importing requirements, ensuring they remain intact across environments.
“All the tags that I had exported are now available for me to look at.”

Works Seamlessly in Offline Mode

When viewing a project through a client‑side offline JSON file, all tags remain visible.
“I can see the tags which are already exported as part of the JSON data format…”

Preserved in Baselines

When you create a baseline, all tags are captured and remain visible in baseline views and baseline exports.
“You can see all the tags are there as part of my baseline.”

Supported for Orphan Items

If an item becomes orphaned due to structural changes, its tags remain intact and are restored when the item is reattached.
“The tag is still there… the actual requirement as well as any tag… being restored.”

Logged in Change History

Every tag update is recorded in the change log using a clear pipe‑delimited format.
“The tags are nothing but a pipe‑delimited string…”

API and Database Enhancements

Tagging is fully supported through the API layer and captured during baseline creation, ensuring consistency across the entire system.

Current Limitation: Mermaid Export

Tags are not yet included in Mermaid diagram exports.
“It does not currently contain any tagging information… this is something we may work on in the future.”

Conclusion

The new Tagging capability in OpenRose gives Business Analysts and Project Managers a smarter, more expressive way to organise requirements. By supporting a wide range of tag formats and integrating tagging across the UI, baselines, offline mode, and JSON workflows, OpenRose makes it easier to classify, search, and track requirements across complex projects.

As the product team summarises:
“This feature helps teams stay organized, improves searchability, and makes it easier to track requirements across complex projects.”

OpenRose, a free and open-source requirements management application / tool. For more information, visit 

https://github.com/openrose