Requirements Management & Traceability

At any stage of the product lifecycle, the required capabilities, characteristics and qualities of the product must be known. If the correct requirements are not known, the designed,built and maintained product will never be correct and consequently will not fulfill the user's needs.

Since the lifecycle of a product is an evolutionary process with many iterations and feedback loops, the requirements evolve over the product lifecycle. Consequently, it is not sufficient to simply capture the requirements once. Requirements must be constantly elicited, gathered, condensed, specified, stored, enhanced, refined, derived, changed, versioned, visualized, communicated, and properly managed.

Good requirements management starts before designing or constructing a product. Statistics show that 60%of errors originate with poor or neglected requirements and analysis activities and therefore already exist at design time. Although product developers always seem to have the opportunity to eliminate the largest category of error, they choose, or worse their managers decide, to rush headlong into constructing the wrong product. And thus they pay many times the price for the product than they would have if the requirements had been gathered and managed correctly at the very beginning.