Requirements management

Requirements management is composed of four major activities: capturing the requirements, organizing them, reviewing them, and controlling them. Each of these activities provides benefits to both the customer and developer in ensuring the project is moving in the right direction. All of these activities occur in conjunction with the requirement definition and analysis phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC). This includes establishing and implementing a process for maintaining control of the requirements for the remainder of the SDLC.

The working definition of each of the four activities in this section provides a starting place for understanding requirements management.

Capturing Requirements

To take a product from concept to reality, the expertise and desires of the client are conveyed to the system analyst. The system analyst in turn must assess the information in relationship to the desired technology and then prepare a feasible customer and developer plan for product development. The feasibility plan is used as the basis for discussions. The requirements are the output product from these discussions wherein the customer and development experts expose the must have vs. the it would be nice to have items while considering the available schedule and budget.

Organizing Requirements

Organizing the requirements by project, system, and subsystem gives both the customer and the developer clear requirements that should be tracked during the development effort. Organizing the requirements in this manner supports simultaneous development work in multiple functional areas, which increases productivity and improves quality. Organizing requirements within these classifications additionally ensures that potential risks to the project can be identified and assigned more easily to the right people, ensuring that viable mitigation of the risks are planned. Organizing the requirements by project, system, and subsystem also helps control change, provides a better definition of what must be tested, and makes sure necessary functionality does not fall through the cracks.

Reviewing Requirements

It is important that the requirements be reviewed by the right personnel to ensure that all of the necessary items have been included and planned for development. When the requirements are organized, the selection of review groups is easier and the review will be better because the right people are assigned to evaluate and approve the requirements. It is during the review of the requirements that the customer gains significant insight as to the developer’s true understanding of the properties the product must possess to ensure success in the marketplace. Skewed perceptions can be corrected at minimal cost at this point in the project.

Controlling Requirements

Once the initial set of requirements has been evaluated and approved, the course of action for moving the project to completion can be planned meaningfully. Impacts to the project plan are minimized by controlling changes to the requirements. The value in controlling changes to the requirements is that the project stays on course, thereby reducing or eliminating cost overruns and schedule delays. The other significant benefit occurs as the system is tested because everyone who has been involved in the project has been able to understand what requirements will be tested and what the product will have, do, and use. In other words, the boundaries established by the requirements can be used to measure the success of the development effort.

Requirements management

by Ralph T. Dowson.

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