Requirements...
Requirements are capabilities and objectives to which any product or service must conform and are common to all development and other engineering activities. Requirements management is the process of eliciting, documenting, organising, and tracking requirements and communicating this information across the various stakeholders and the project team. It ensures that iterative refinements and unanticipated changes are dealt with during the project life-cycle, with a view towards the overall quality of the resultant service or product. |
Requirement Management
What is it?
Requirements management involves understanding the relationship between goals, functions and constraints in terms of the specification of products, including systems behaviour, and service definition.
The goals provide the motivation for programmes and projects and represent the 'why' and to a certain extent the 'what' in development terms. The specification provides the basis for analysing requirements, validating that they are indeed what stakeholders want, defining what needs to be delivered, and verifying the resultant developed product or service.
Requirements management aims to establish a common understanding between the stakeholders and the project team(s) that will be addressing the requirements at an early stage in the project life-cycle and maintain control by establishing suitable base-lines for both development and management use.
Why it is important?
A general survey of some 300 projects across car manufacturing, telecoms and aerospace industries indicated that the main cause of failures were management and requirements issues. Five of the top eight issues were related to poor handling of requirements.
For software projects, according to the Standish Group, 31% of software projects are cancelled before the product is delivered to the customers, while 53% cost 189% or more of their original budgets. 40-60% of the software defects and failures being attributed to poor requirements, thus reflecting extent of the problem and the need to identify, communicate and manage IS project requirements.
A project that fulfils its requirements is by definition a success. Requirements management ensures that suitable models of the service product are produced early in the life-cycle in order to provide fresh insights and to improve the conceptualisation of the end product or service.
Requirements management starts with the definition of requirements and continues through the project, culminating in the verification of the end product against the specified requirements.
Requirements management has a strong association with quality management in ascertaining what the customer wants (quality) and evaluating the solution in terms of whether it meets these requirements efficiently (conformance).
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