Manage Requirements

The challenge of managing the requirements of a software- intensive system is that they are dynamic: You must expect them to change during the life of a software project. Furthermore, identifying a system's true requirements ”those that weigh most heavily on the system's economic and technical goals ”is a continuous process. Except for the most trivial system, it is impossible to completely and exhaustively state a system's requirements before the start of development. Indeed, as a new or evolving system changes, a user 's understanding of the system's requirements also changes.

A requirement is a condition or capability a system must have. The active management of requirements encompasses three activities: eliciting , organizing, and documenting the system's required functionality and constraints; evaluating changes to these requirements and assessing their impact; and tracking and documenting trade-offs and decisions.

Managing the requirements of your project offers a number of solutions to the root causes of software development problems:

  1. A disciplined approach is built into requirements management.

  2. Communications are based on defined requirements.

  3. Requirements can be prioritized, filtered, and traced.

  4. An objective assessment of functionality and performance is possible.

  5. Inconsistencies are detected more easily.

  6. With suitable tool support, it is possible to provide a repository for a system's requirements, attributes, and traces, with automatic links to external documents.



The Rational Unified Process. An Introduction
Blogosphere: Best of Blogs
ISBN: B0072U14D8
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 193

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