How Do I Review Hundreds of Requirements Fast in Cameo?

Build a generic table. A generic table shows every requirement in your scope as one row — ID, name, text, and any attribute you care about — in a single scrollable, sortable, editable view. Reviewing 300 requirements diagram-by-diagram takes days; reviewing the same 300 in a table takes an afternoon. It’s easily a 10× speedup, and it’s built into Cameo with zero scripting.

We watch teams do requirements reviews by opening requirement diagrams one at a time, squinting at boxes, and hoping they didn’t miss a package. Diagrams are for communicating structure. Tables are for reviewing content at volume. Here’s how we set one up.

Why diagrams are the wrong tool for this job

A requirement diagram shows maybe ten or fifteen requirement boxes before it becomes wallpaper. The text gets truncated, the custom attributes are invisible unless you turn them on per-symbol, and there’s no guarantee the diagram shows every requirement in the package — a requirement that nobody dragged onto a diagram is still in the model, silently unreviewed.

A generic table has none of these problems. It queries the model directly, so if a requirement exists in scope, it’s in the table. Full text, full attributes, no truncation, no “did anyone actually draw this one?”

Build the table in two minutes

In the containment tree, right-click the package where you want the table to live and create a new Generic Table (it’s under the diagram creation options; in recent versions you’ll find it grouped with the other tables like Instance Table and Glossary Table).

Two settings define everything:

• Element Type — set it to Requirement. If you use requirement subtypes (functional, performance, interface stereotypes), you can list several types or just use the base Requirement type and let the table catch all of them.
• Scope — drag in the package (or packages) to pull from. Scope is recursive, so pointing it at your top-level Requirements package catches everything underneath. For the drone model, we scope it to the whole requirements tree and get flight-control, propulsion, power, and payload requirements in one view.

The table populates instantly. Every requirement in scope, one per row.

Pick columns that match your review checklist

The default columns are usually # (row number), Name, and Text. Click the Columns button in the table toolbar to add more. This is where the table earns its keep, because the column list includes every attribute the elements actually have:

• Id — requirement number, essential for reviewers.
• Text — the actual requirement statement.
• Custom attributes — if your requirements carry a stereotype with attributes like Verification Method, Priority, Rationale, or Source, those show up as selectable columns too. This is the feature people miss: your custom tags are first-class table columns, not buried in a Specification window.
• Derived or relation-based columns — in recent versions you can add columns showing related elements, like which blocks satisfy the requirement. That turns your review table into a lightweight traceability report; if you want to go deeper on that thread, see How Do I Model Requirements Traceability in SysML?.

Sort by any column with a click. Sorting by a Verification Method column and finding forty blank cells is a review finding in itself.

If you’d rather start from a working example than build the customization yourself, our Dropdowns & Custom Columns in SysML Requirements project file is a ready-made Cameo project with exactly these custom attributes set up as dropdown-backed table columns.

Filter to the slice you’re reviewing

You rarely review everything at once. Use the table’s filter to narrow the rows:

• Filter by text to isolate a subsystem — every requirement mentioning “battery” or “GPS” in the drone model.
• Filter by an attribute value — only Priority = High, or only requirements with an empty Verification Method.
• Adjust the scope itself for a structural cut — just the Propulsion Requirements package for today’s session.

The point is to make the table match the meeting. A 45-minute review of the power subsystem should look at power rows, not scroll past 250 others.

Edit in bulk, right in the table

The table isn’t read-only — it’s a direct view of the model. Click into a Text cell and fix the wording; the requirement is updated everywhere, on every diagram it appears on. Even better, you can select many rows and change an attribute for all of them at once. Re-categorizing thirty requirements from “TBD” to “Analysis” is one multi-select and one edit, not thirty trips to the Specification window.

Typo sweeps, filling in missing IDs, assigning owners — the boring hygiene work that never happens when each fix costs four clicks — becomes genuinely fast.

Export to Excel for people who don’t have Cameo

Most requirement reviewers — chief engineers, customers, safety leads — don’t have Cameo licenses and shouldn’t need one to read requirement text. The table toolbar has an Export action that writes the table, exactly as scoped, filtered, and columned, to an Excel/CSV file.

Our review loop looks like this: build the table, filter to the review scope, export, and email the spreadsheet with a column for reviewer comments. Comments come back, and we make the edits in the table in one sitting. In recent versions there’s also a sync-with-Excel capability that can round-trip changes, but even the plain one-way export removes the biggest bottleneck: nobody is transcribing requirements into a spreadsheet by hand anymore. The same table-to-Excel workflow scales well beyond requirements, too — if you’d like to watch it done end to end, our tutorial Exporting a BOM with Structure Map & Generic Table uses it to pull a bill of materials straight out of the model.

One habit worth adopting: keep the table itself in the model, in a Reviews or Queries package. It’s a saved query — next month’s review is “open table, re-export,” not “rebuild from scratch.” If you want views that maintain themselves even more aggressively, that’s what smart packages are for.

Where to go from here

If your team is still reviewing requirements diagram-by-diagram — or worse, in a Word export someone maintains by hand — that’s usually a sign the model has more low-hanging fruit like this. CameoMagic runs advisory engagements and hands-on team training built around exactly these workflow upgrades, and the easiest first step is our free 30-minute model review: bring your model, and we’ll show you where the hours are hiding. Reach out at cameomagic.com.

Go deeper: Build a requirements traceability matrix in Cameo step by step, with the video and related tutorials. Requirements traceability matrix guide →