The purpose of requirements management is to ensure that an organization documents, verifies, and meets the needs and expectations of its customers and internal or external stakeholders.
The traceability thus established is used in managing requirements to report back fulfilment of company and stakeholder interests in terms of compliance, completeness, coverage, and consistency.
[5] Requirements come from different sources, like the business person ordering the product, the marketing manager and the actual user.
To illustrate, consider a standard five-phase development process with Investigation, Feasibility, Design, Construction and Test, and Release stages.
Some requirements will change, either because they simply weren’t extracted, or because internal or external forces at work affect the project in mid-cycle.
As the system develops, each new feature opens a world of new possibilities, so the requirements specification anchors the team to the original vision and permits a controlled discussion of scope change.
“Do we have the right people to create the tool?” “Do we need new equipment to support expanded software roles?” This last question is an important type.
The team must inquire into whether the newest automated tools will add sufficient processing power to shift some of the burden from the user to the system in order to save people time.
The overarching goal of the requirements management effort for a software project would thus be to make sure the work being automated gets assigned to the proper processor.
Make the system store the data and fill in the second screen as needed.” The deliverable from the Feasibility stage is the budget and schedule for the project.
Assuming that costs are accurately determined and benefits to be gained are sufficiently large, the project can proceed to the Design stage.
The Taurus launch set nationwide sales records when the new car came out, primarily because it was so roomy and comfortable to drive.
Numerical software execution results or through-put on a network test, for example, provides analytical evidence that the requirement has been met.
From that point on, the data coming in about the application’s acceptability is gathered and fed into the Investigation phase of the next generation or release.
Acquiring a tool to support requirements management is no trivial matter and it needs to be undertaken as part of a broader process improvement initiative.
Organizations may get burdened with expensive support contracts, disproportionate effort can get misdirected towards learning to use the tool and configuring it to address particular needs, and inappropriate use that can lead to erroneous decisions.