Practice: Requirements Management
This practice defines a basic approach for managing requirements.
Relationships
Purpose

If a project is small and co-located, it is not too difficult to communicate information about requirements. However, when there are multiple organizations involved, or as teams and projects get larger, it becomes necessary to record information about requirements, to ensure agreement and enable effective decision-making.

This practice provides a good starting point for requirements management.  It recommends basic information to track about your requirements, including a standard set of traceability information to help you assess change impact. 

What is covered in this practice

This practice covers the following topics:

  • obtaining requirements from stakeholders
  • assigning attributes to each requirements
  • checking completeness and correctness of attributes
  • ensuring project participants' commitment to the requirement
  • tracing requirements to other project items
  • assessing impact of requirements changes 
  • tracking status of requirements
  • ensuring consistency of requirements
  • updating requirements attributes
  • referencing/storing approvals (can be a reference to a change request)
  • propagating changes to requirements and storing history of changes 

What is not covered in this practice

Effective requirements management also requires change management.  The following aspects of requirements management are not covered here, but are expected to be covered by a change management practice.

  • managing a defect log
  • receiving, evaluating, approving change requests
How to read this practice
To understand this practice, you can start form reading the tasks and their steps, then reading the workproducts and related guidances. Here are some terms and concepts that are important to this practice.
Additional Information
For more information on this practice,  see the practice resource page on IBM® DeveloperWorks®.