Requirements Status Trend
This metric tracks the number of requirements by status.
Main Description

Purpose

Teams monitor this metric to understand the status of all identified requirements. Some requirements are approved and will be incorporated into the release. Others have been proposed by stakeholders, but not yet approved. Requirements move between various other states as they are are being worked on, validated, and tested. The team needs to know the state of each requirement and have visibility into requirements status trends across the lifecycle in order:

  • to effectively plan and manage the project
  • monitor scope creep
  • identify when corrective actions are necessary to meet release commitments
  • help assess process improvements related to requirements management practices and tools

Definition

Count: Total number of requirements in each status (approved, incorporated, proposed, validated)

It may be useful to group by requirement type, such as feature, supplementary, or use case.

Analysis

A good way to monitor Requirements Status Trend over time is with a stacked bar chart, plotting the number of requirements for each status on the Y axis. A line chart is also useful for monitoring trends over time.

Expected trend - As the project progresses, the number of requirements in the initial statuses such as "Proposed" should decrease and the number in later statuses such as "Incorporated" should increase.

A high number of Proposed and Approved requirements remaining later in the lifecycle can indicate a problem. Some requirements are likely to not be satisfied. Confirm that there is not a large number of high priority requirements that are still in a proposed or approved state. When high priority requirements are not addressed, customer satisfaction is likely to be very low and the project schedule is at risk. Confirm that timely reviews of proposed requirements are taking place so that stakeholders are aware of the status of their requests (if they will be implemented or not). In general, the team should review their current requirements management process to determine if process improvements are necessary.

A low number of validated requirements indicates that the team has not performed enough testing on the system. Focus on increasing testing efforts. Review Test Coverage of Requirements or Percentage of Tested to Implemented Requirements to ensure that all implemented requirements have been tested.

The following figure is an example of a Requirements Status Trend chart, where the vertical axis represents the number of requirements by status.

Requirements Status Trend

Frequency and reporting

Trends should be monitored at the end of each iteration, and discussed with the team when problems are identified.

Collection and reporting tools

Data can be collected with IBM® Rational® ReqPro® and IBM® Rational® DOORS®.

Assumptions and prerequisites

  • Team members are consistently updating requirements information in a requirements management tool
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