Requirements Management

Requirements Management

• Requirements management includes all activities that maintain the integrity and accuracy of requirements agreements throughout the project.
• It helps to ensure that the effort invested in requirements development isn't lost.
• It reduces the expectation gap by keeping all project stakeholders informed about the current state of the requirements throughout the development process.

Requirements Management Activities

• Documenting these activities and training practitioners in their performance enables the members of the organization to conduct them consistently and effectively.

Requirements Baseline

• A requirements baseline is a set of requirements that stakeholders have agreed to, often defining the contents of a specific planned release or development iteration.
• It can include business requirements, user requirements, functional and nonfunctional requirements, a data dictionary, and various analysis models.
• At the time a set of requirements is baselined, typically following review and approval, the requirements are placed under change management.
• Subsequent changes can be made only through the project's defined change control procedure.

Version Control

• Version control applies at the level of both individual requirements and requirements sets, commonly represented in the form of documents.
• Begin version control as soon as you draft a requirement or a document so you can retain a history of changes made.
• Every team member must be able to access the current version of the requirements.
• To minimize confusion and miscommunication, permit only designated individuals to update the requirements, and make sure the version identifier changes whenever an update is made.
• Each circulated version of a requirements document or each requirement in a tool should include a revision history that identifies the changes made, the date of each change, the individual who made the change, and the reason for each change.

Version Control Methods

• The most robust approach to version control is to store the requirements in a requirements management tool.
• Track changes using a word processor's revision marks feature.
• Store requirements documents in a version control tool, which will let you revert to earlier versions if necessary and know who changed each document, when, and why.
• Simplest way is to manually label each revision of a document according to a standard convention.

Requirements Attributes

• RM tools typically provide several system-generated attributes in addition to letting you define others.
• Potential requirements attributes to consider include date the requirement was created, current version number, author, priority, status, origin or source, rational, release number, stakeholder, and validation method.

Requirements Status Tracking

• Tracking the status of each functional requirement throughout development provides a precise gauge of project progress.
• Tracking status means comparing where you really are at a particular time against the expectation of what "complete" means for this development cycle.
• Choose the status attributes that matter to you, and it's good to keep track of rejected requirements as they tend to resurface later.