Requirements Management can be defined as a procedure that traces, captures and manages the stakeholder requirements and changes that take place all through the product life cycle. It is an integral area under Requirements Engineering. The objective of Requirements Management is to effectively manage the scope of the project, specification changes, minimize the project risk
1. Importance of Requirements Management Solutions
Requirements Management can be defined as a procedure that traces, captures and manages the
stakeholder requirements and changes that take place all through the product life cycle. It is an integral
area under Requirements Engineering. The objective of Requirements Management is to effectively
manage the scope of the project, specification changes, minimize the project risk and also make sure
that the project meets the real business targets. It has been estimated that 40 percent of the
requirements generate rework during the project lifecycle.
A conventional process that is used to facilitate the discovery of requirements management is to define
them through a system’s anticipated outputs, inputs, attributes and functions. Irrespective of the
chosen methods, several medium to large scale software products have many requirements. Managing
them efficiently, at times can be a major challenge. Since the objective of requirements specification is
not only to attain agreement but to form the basis of the software product design, understanding
between the user and the development organization is vital.
Today requirements management still is a major challenge in all dimensions of software development
life cycle projects. For certain smaller projects, the requirements might be brief and informal, making it
more complex to manage the same appropriately. In case of huge projects, especially the ones with
aggressive development schedules, the requirements generally to change in an ongoing manner and
managing them appropriately seems to be a concern. If the requirements cannot be managed
effectively, the concerns prioritizing, organizing, managing, controlling and offering resources can
become major concerns during development.
Today companies specializing in application lifecycle management solutions have introduced advanced
requirements management tools that are 100 percent web-based applications. It has been set up for
project optimization that is distributed between a campus building and sites that is round the globe. All
its features, including configuration and administrative processes, are supported through the web.
The benefits that results from this are:
Effective telecommuting
Efficient management and proper control of overseas projects
Better collaboration with varied internal functional teams
Improved collaboration with solution providers
Innovative requirements management tools today come with a compact traceability relation features. It
helps in all types of associations, including the custom ones, between requirements thereby allowing
you to set up logical links, such as “depending”, “bi-directional” and “affecting” between the
requirements and then be able to view then in a set of multiple visualizing tools. Furthermore, it also
includes the folder hierarchy report on the Requirements traceability, Requirements traceability matrix
and the Requirements Traceability Relation Network Diagram. The tool facilitates in both reactive and
proactive analysis.
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