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Modern Requirements NextGen: Built for the Future
Modern Requirements NextGen is coming soon, and it’s designed to raise the bar for how teams work across different industries manage requirements inside Azure DevOps.
In this release, we’ve refreshed the experience across the platform to feel more Azure DevOps-native, while improving performance and reliability across key modules. We’re also focused on AI-powered requirements management and intelligence, stronger compliance support for regulated teams, and tighter end-to-end traceability from planning to validation.
This is a short teaser of what’s ahead, and we’re excited for you to try it.
What This Upgrade Delivers (Benefits You’ll Notice Immediately)
Modern Requirements NextGen is about making day-to-day work faster, smoother, and more dependable for every role, from BAs to engineering and compliance teams.
- Azure DevOps–aligned experience: In MR NextGen, we have designed screens, flows, and UI controls according to the ADO style. This helps in providing a more Azure DevOps-aligned user experience and reduces onboarding efforts
- 10–100x faster execution (depending on the workflow): Creating Smart reports, traceability matrices, and Smart Docs is 10x faster, even with large backlogs.
- 10x fewer exceptions and errors: More stable workflows with fewer interruptions during reviews, reporting, and trace analysis.
- Better performance at enterprise scale: Built to handle large datasets and high usage without slowing down critical workflows.
What’s Updated & New in Modern Requirements NextGen
Modern Requirements NextGen is a complete UI re-architecture across the product, designed to make requirements work more smoothly within Azure DevOps. We’ve updated UI across all modules of MR, and here are highlighting the most important upgrades across Smart Docs, Traceability, Reviews, Baselines, and Reporting.
Traceability matrices: faster creation + new tree view + analytics (new)
We’ve made the biggest upgrade in the traceability module in MR NextGen.
Most important update: Traceability matrix creation is very fast for large backlogs containing more than 4000+ work items.
Other than that, users can now see work items as a link tree view, which shows work items in a parent-child hierarchy. This helps in understanding requirements coverage better without jumping between screens.
MR NextGen also introduces the analytics view for trace matrices, which shows the total number of work items, child depth, coverage percentages, state, and hierarchy distributions. With this, teams can quickly find gaps in coverage.
Smart Docs: work item hierarchy view (new)
Of course, the performance of Smart Docs is also 20x faster, which was not optional.
Besides that, Smart Docs now shows a hierarchy view for added work items. It provides a proper context of the requirements structure, including parent-child relationships, to the reviewer within the document. This improves requirements traceability in regulatory industries.
Smart Edit: editing + versioning in one window
MR NextGen introduces the Smart Edit experience that combines Smart Editor and Smart View from MR. With this, teams can edit and manage versions of requirements in one place.
Updated Review module
Review now supports replying to comments. This allows teams to do threaded discussions with clear context.
What This Means for Our Customers
If you’re already using Modern Requirements, you’ve built a strong way to manage requirements inside Azure DevOps. What we’ve seen in enterprise rollouts is that the demands keep rising: larger backlogs, tighter release cycles, more stakeholders, and higher compliance expectations. MR NextGen is built to support that next level of scale without adding overhead or complexity for your teams.
Here’s what existing customers will notice most:
- Less time spent waiting during traceability and reporting activities, even with thousands of work items
- Fewer interruptions during reviews, baselines, and evidence generation
- More confident coverage checks with clearer trace analysis (tree view + analytics)
- Cleaner handoffs between roles, because hierarchy, versioning, and review context are easier to follow
- Better outcomes at scale, where performance and reliability actually determine whether a tool gets adopted
And NextGen is not only about today’s workflows. It also lays the foundation for the next wave of intelligent capabilities inside Modern Requirements. We are actively investing in AI-powered requirements management and intelligence, including lightweight agents that can automate repeatable work. For example, agents can update parent items automatically when child tasks are completed, support advanced conditional logic, and provide execution logs so teams can see exactly what ran and what changed.
- For our customers, the message is simple: NextGen helps you move faster now, stay audit-ready, and prepare your requirements process for what’s coming next.
Timeline and How to Try It
Modern Requirements NextGen will be rolled out in production from mid-March. This will give teams time to explore improvements in performance, stability, traceability, and Smart Docs workflows using real project data.
Contact your account representative to request MR NextGen access and schedule an evaluation session.
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