Important Features That Requirements Management Software Must Possess

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
Comment this article

Requirements management is one of the important phases of the software development life cycle as requirements form the foundation for developing high quality software products. For development and testing teams to deliver effectively, there is the need of proper requirements. Wikipedia defines requirements management as “the process of documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing and agreeing on requirements and then controlling change and communicating to relevant stakeholders.” As requirements management is increasingly important for software project success there is the need of effective requirements management tools to ease the workload of the software development team. Here is a quick look at some of the important features that good requirements management software must possess.

A Useful Tool for Geographically Dispersed Team
Being web based it allows developers to work from the same platform, no matter where they ...
... are located, whether it is between buildings on a campus, or at sites around the world.

More effective telecommuting
Better management and control of offshore projects
Better collaboration with different internal functional groups and service partners

Comprehensive Traceability Relation Features
The availability of comprehensive traceability relation features allows multiple types of relations, including custom ones, between Requirements thereby facilitating the creation of logical links (‘depending’, ‘affecting’, and ‘bi-directional’) between Requirements and view them in a number of visualizing tools.

Proactive and Reactive Impact Analysis
It automatically forwards impact of changes to stakeholders to ensure synchronization and to undertake corrective actions at the earliest to minimize the cost of changes at the end of the lifecycle.

Requirements Reuse
Reuse of well-written and implemented requirements help project teams to cut down on development time and enhance project quality

Automated Change Management
Automated change management process works in harmony with the automated Requirements Management process thereby helping in reviewing, approving, implementing, and testing requirement changes within acceptable costs and timelines.

Requirements Reporting
It helps to produce reports and requirements documents of various kinds such as marketing Requirements Document (MRD), System Requirements Specifications (SRS), Product Roadmap Document, Test Compliance Report, Trend Charts, Burn Down Charts, Requirements Stability Chart, and Graphical Charts.

Integrated Requirements Management and Test Management
Integrated Requirements Management and Test Management work together to give the users the power of QA- driven Requirements Management.

Customer Satisfaction and Competitive Edge
It helps enterprises to enhance customer satisfaction, bring a competitive edge to its product lines, and improve business and market share by setting up an excellent system for capturing customer inputs both for new product ideas as well as for improvements in existing products.

Read more about : Application Lifecycle Management, requirements traceability matrix