What is requirements management?

Requirements management is a methodology that enables development teams to document, trace, analyze, prioritize and agree upon requirements throughout the end-to-end product development lifecycle.
 

The purpose of requirements management is to ensure that software and product development goals are met. When performed effectively, it fosters communication with stakeholders throughout the engineering and project lifecycle, ensuring that the final product meets their expectations and user needs. It can also help project teams detect errors early, reducing project costs and risks.

Requirements management can be found in application lifecycle management (ALM), software development, software engineering and agile development methods. Where project management in these scenarios ensures the project is completed efficiently and on schedule, requirements management ensures the end product is built correctly.

The product manager is typically responsible for requirements development and curation. However, a set of requirements can be influenced by any stakeholder, including customers, partners, sales, support, management, engineering, operations and product team members.

According to the IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology, a requirement is defined as:

“(1) A condition or capability needed by a user to solve a problem or achieve an objective. (2) A condition or capability that must be met or possessed by a system or system component to satisfy a contract, standard, specification or other formally imposed documents. (3) A documented representation of a condition or capability as in (1) or (2).”¹

That is, requirements are any information relating to the stakeholder expectations and user needs for a new system, product or application. These expectations and needs may include textual requirements, use cases, diagrams and feature descriptions. In the agile context, requirements will include user stories and epics.

Additionally, project teams use requirements to capture information that may otherwise be absent from product backlogs. For example, requirements can include information concerning non-functional requirements, feature descriptions, stakeholder meeting notes and architectural decisions.

There are widely considered to be three types of requirements:

Requirements can also be classified into three categories: functional, non-functional and domain.

Functional requirements refer to the functionality of a new system, product or application. These requirements are measurable and critical to meeting the expectations and needs of the end users.

Example: the software should allow users to sign in with their IBM accounts.

Non-functional requirements refer to the performance of a system, product or application’s functional requirements. For instance, a system’s security, reliability and usability are all non-functional requirements.

Example: the online banking portal should fully load within three seconds after login.

Domain requirements refer to specific regulations, standards, rules and terminologies within an industry or domain that the system, product or application must adhere to.

Example: the healthcare application must comply with HIPAA requirements.

Products are only as good as the requirements that drive them. Requirements management ensures that projects efficiently meet stakeholder and user needs and expectations. Managing requirements minimizes the chance of defects, risks and costs, while allowing for faster delivery, reusability and traceability.

Requirements management is especially critical today, as the Internet of Things (IoT) has changed not only how products work, but also their design and development process. Products are continuously becoming “smarter” and more complex, with more lines of code and additional software. Requirements management helps businesses overcome the complexity and interdependencies in today’s software development and engineering lifecycles to streamline product development and accelerate deployment.

Issues within requirements management are often cited as a major cause of project failures. Inadequately defined requirements can result in scope creep, project delays, cost overruns and poor product quality that fails to meet stakeholder needs and safety requirements.

A requirements management plan (RMP) helps explain how a project team will receive, analyze, document and manage all the requirements within a project. The plan usually covers everything from initial information gathering to more detailed product requirements that the team will gather throughout the project lifecycle.

There are several key items to define in a requirements management plan: the project overview, the requirements gathering process, roles and responsibilities, tools and traceability.

Having a requirements management plan is critical to project success, as it enables engineering teams to control project scope and direct the product development lifecycle. Requirements management software can provide the tools to execute the plan, helping to reduce costs, accelerate time to market and improve quality control.

A typical requirements management process complements the systems engineering V-model, which is a systems engineering approach that places equal weight on both verification and validation. A requirements management workflow may follow these steps:

• Requirements elicitation: collect initial requirements from stakeholders
  
  
• Requirements analysis: Analyze requirements to ensure full understanding of needs and expectations
  
  
• Requirements definition: Define and record analyzed requirements in a clear and concise manner
  
  
• Requirements prioritization: Prioritize needs and expectations according to what is most valuable to the business and end user
  
  
• Requirements approval: Agree on the requirements with stakeholders and receive approval
  
  
• Requirements traceability: Trace requirements to work items (activities or tasks within the project)
  
  
• Requirements change requests: Query stakeholders after implementation on needed changes to requirements
  
  
• Requirements validation and verification: Use test management to verify and validate system requirements
  
  
• Requirements change management: Perform an impact analysis to assess the impact of changes
  
  
• Requirements revisions: Revise requirements according to assessed changes
  
  
• Requirements document updates: Record changes within a software requirements specification (SRS) document, product requirements document (PRD), requirements traceability matrix (RTM) or other document type

The steps within this process can help teams harness the complexity inherent in developing smart, connected products. Requirements management solutions can also help streamline the process, optimizing speed to market, expanding opportunities and improving quality.

Traditionally, systems engineers and product design teams would manage requirements using Excel spreadsheets, emails, wikis and other tools. But in the age of IoT and increasing requirements complexity, these teams require better visibility into changes, deeper insight into data and shared tools for global collaboration.

Digital requirements management tools help track requirements changes in a secure, central and accessible location, which allows for stronger collaboration between team members. Increased transparency minimizes rework and enhances agility while helping to ensure that requirements are compliant with industry or regulatory standards.

Artificial intelligence (AI) further augments digital requirements management. The technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, decision-making, and autonomy can also help manage the increasing data and complexity of requirements management—improving quality and reducing cycle times.

The benefits of AI and digital requirements management include:

Automated, cloud-based requirements solutions let team members work together in real time, sharing information in and between documents, irrespective of location. Organizations can digitally manage and monitor the entire version control and variant process through shared dashboards and email notifications. This way, teams always have access to the latest, most accurate information when they need it.

Traditional requirements management tools don’t have the ability to annotate requirements specifications without altering original structure and context. In word processors, users then resort to copying requirements from documents to spreadsheets and manually synchronizing changes across the different versions. Digital requirements management allows teams to create templates to streamline information structures, enabling global collaboration and a single source of truth.

These tools can automate the creation and maintenance of relationships throughout the development lifecycle, including relationships between project requirements, work items, architecture, design and test plans. For example, they can link individual artifacts to test cases for full visibility into changes as they happen. Greater traceability also helps teams more efficiently achieve compliance with audit requests. It also helps them understand the impacts of changes for a more appropriate change management response.

With digital requirements management solutions, teams can use the same requirement in multiple places without having to redefine it. This feature enables companies to more efficiently create versions, variants and prototypes of products and systems. A “master” copy ensures that changes to one version are rolled out to all instances. Teams can create baselines to identify the state of a requirement in real time to reduce the occurrence of user errors.

Some tools using natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to improve the completeness, consistency and accuracy of requirements as they are being written. The technology augments human work to remove ambiguity and avoid costly errors. Machine learning (ML) allows a tool to learn nuance and context, so the more teams use it, the smarter it becomes.