Work Product Descriptor (Artifact): Requirements Attributes
This artifact describes a repository of project requirements and the information that needs to be captured in order to manage the requirement set and the project as a whole. The information captured can vary from one requirement type to another.
Purpose
To indicate to the analysts the type of information that needs to be captured when a requirement is created or modified.
Relationships
RolesResponsible: Modified By:
Output From
Description
Main DescriptionA project requirement does not just consist of the description of the requirement. Each requirement needs a set of properties - called attributes - that capture important information about it. And requirements that belong to different categories can have a different set of attributes. All requirements must have a core set of attributes to capture critical information about each requirement. The information that is captured in the attributes can used to generate views and reports, which are used to track and measure progress.
Brief Outline

The following attributes can be stored.

Attributes Description Possible Values
Name Short name of the requirement
Description Requirement statements
Requirement type Type of requirement
  • Feature (a set of logically related functional requirements that provides a capability to the user)
  • Non-Functional (the description of a property or characteristic that a software system must have, other than an observable system behavior)
  • Supporting Document
  • Term
  • User Story Elaboration (a statement explaining the intent of a user; it can be elaborated through conversations and confirmation, leveraging techniques such as sketching and storyboarding)
Default format
Default format for requirement artifact
Text, Collection, Sketch, Storyboard
Business Priority Priority of requirement from business perspective
Must, Should, Could, Won't
Priority
Priority of requirement from development perspective
Low, Medium, High
Status* Status of requirement Draft, Under Review, Approved, Rejected, Deprecated
Product Owner
Responsible Person
Origin
Source of requirement Customers, Marketing


* If the requirement is newly added or edited, mark the status as "draft". While project participants review the requirement, it's status is "under review". After all of the project participants commit to the requirement, the change the status to "approved". Mark those requirements that are not approved as "rejected". Over time, a particular requirement might become irrelevant or out of scope - rather than deleting an irrelevant requirement, mark it as "deprecated".

Properties
Optional
Planned
Illustrations
Key Considerations
Requirement attributes help the project team understand, prioritize, manage, track and validate the project requirements.
Tailoring
Representation Options

For a small project, requirements and their attributes can be maintained in a spreadsheet or small database. For a larger project with a large and complex requirement set it's best to use a requirements management tool where custom attributes can be created. Whatever method is chosen, it needs to enable easy reporting, querying and sorting of requirements based on their attributes values so as to facilitate tracking of progress and enable easy identification of issues

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