Requirements management – a part of requirements engineering
Requirements Engineering is a complex task that deals with the process of developing and verifying a system’s requirements. The process of requirements engineering includes requirements formulation, validation, verification, and management. To develop requirements, you need to collect them from different sources like the customer, environmental factors, government regulations, etc. The next steps include documenting the requirements, reviewing them with the stakeholders, and translating them into specific, testable, and achievable requirements.
Requirements, as well as the system, and even the sub-systems, will need to be constantly verified and validated during the process. Establishing traceability, early in the process, between different requirements, and between requirements and test plans, will make the verification of the requirements (and later of the system) easier. The goal of Requirements Engineering is to understand the stakeholders’ needs and ensure that the final product meets their expectations.
What is Requirements Management?
As part of Requirements Engineering, Requirements Management is a systematic process of organizing, connecting, and controlling the requirements for a system, project, or product. Requirements management is focused on managing and controlling changes and traces within the requirements life cycle. The size of the requirement sets in complex projects demands a proper digitalization of the process using specialized requirements management systems (RMS).
Benefits of using a Requirements Management System
A Requirements Management System improves the communication between the stakeholders and ensures that they have a common management of the requirements (versions, changes, traces, configurations, document management, etc.). When there is a team working on the requirements, it is important that the tool is collaborative and that you can trace every change that is made. It is common to find defects in the development process of the requirements, but proper requirements management will reduce defects, and the cost in time and money will be less. It is also common to find failures in the product outcome, and correct requirements management will reduce rework and improve the outcome. Other important features of requirements management tools are that they should be easy to use, be able to establish automatic relationships across requirements, and offer impact analysis.
SES ENGINEERING Studio
Our tools, either as a part of SES ENGINEERING Studio or one by one as a Stand-Alone, connect and interoperate with almost all the relevant requirements management systems in the market. RAT – AUTHORING Tool offers writing assistance for requirements and documents. RQA – QUALITY Studio analyses the quality of your requirements and documents. Traceability Studio keeps a trace of all the changes in your requirements, and V&V Studio takes care of the verification and validation tasks.
Requirements Management Systems/Tools List
We have gathered information on some Requirements Management Tools that help you document, analyze, trace, prioritize, and communicate your requirements. In this list, we have included non-traditional requirements management tools like MS Word and MS Excel. Thanks to their excellent writing features, these are typically tools to start writing requirements and then migrate to more professional tools when the maturity of the team in Requirements Engineering is enough. By including our Requirements Management capabilities in MS Word or MS Excel you can use them directly as a Requirements Management tool. (More information in our Connectors section)
Please, note that this list does not imply a recommendation.