Introduction

TheoWorks turns a sphinx-needs project into a workspace you can actually live in. Instead of hand-editing RST directives, you write and link needs — requirements, design elements, tests, and documentation — in a browser editor, and TheoWorks writes them back to your repository as clean, reviewable RST.

Who it is for

• Engineers and technical writers who maintain requirements, design, and test documentation and want the round-trip-to-Git safety of plain text without hand-writing directives.
• Teams working to a standard — Automotive SPICE, ISO 26262, or a V-model — who need typed needs, traceability links, and validation gates.
• Ops/platform admins evaluating a self-hosted rollout on their own infrastructure.

What makes it different

Git-native round-trip. Your source of truth is the RST in your repo — not a database. Every edit TheoWorks makes produces a minimal, clean diff you can review in a merge request. Nothing is locked away in a proprietary format.

Typed, traceable needs. Needs have a type (for example a system requirement or a test), fields (status, and any custom fields your schema defines), and typed links to other needs. TheoWorks renders the traceability graph so you can see what satisfies, refines, or verifies what.

Validation and workflows. Your project's schema (its metamodel) declares which fields and links each need type requires and which status transitions are legal. TheoWorks surfaces findings inline and can gate a build on them.

Two flavors, one product

TheoWorks comes in two flavors that share the same editor and the same git-native model:

• Web demo — a hosted trial you open in your browser. The fastest way to see the editor and try it on a sample project.
• Self-hosted — you run TheoWorks on your own machine or server with a guided launcher, pointed at your own Git repository. Your data never leaves your infrastructure.

Read Choose your flavor to decide which to start with, or go straight to the Quickstart.