Artifact:  Requirements Management Plan

Requirements Management Plan	Describes the requirements documentation, requirement types, and their respective requirements attributes, specifying the information and control mechanisms to be collected and used for measuring, reporting, and controlling changes to the product requirements.
Role:	System Analyst
Enclosed in:	Software Development Plan
Templates:	HTML Others
Examples:	Requirements Management Plan, from the Wylie College Process Web Site Requirements Management Plan, from the Collegiate Sports Paging System (e-business)
More Information:	Guidelines:Requirements Management Plan Concept: Requirement Concept: Requirements Management Concept: Types of Requirements Concept: Traceability
Purpose Timing Responsibility Tailoring

Input to Activities: Detail a Use Case Detail the Software Requirements Define Assessment and Traceability Needs Launch Development Case Compile Software Development Plan Manage Dependencies Develop Requirements Management Plan

Output from Activities: Manage Dependencies Develop Requirements Management Plan

Purpose

A Requirements Management Plan should be developed to specify the information and control mechanisms that will be collected and used for measuring, reporting, and controlling changes to the product requirements. 

The purpose of the Requirements Management Plan is to describe how the project will set up requirements documents and requirement types, and their respective requirement attributes and traceability.  

Timing

The Requirements Management Plan is developed during the Inception phase and is updated at each major milestone.

Responsibility

The System Analyst is responsible for creating the Requirements Management Plan.

Tailoring

Tailoring should, at a minimum, include defining the traceability items, constraints, and attributes applicable to your project.  Other significant traceability concerns include:

• relationship to other plans
• tool considerations

Relationship to Other Plans

The Requirements Management Plan contains information that may be covered to a greater or lesser extent by other plans.  The following approaches can be used to handle this potential overlap:

• Reference the content in another plan.
• Provide the overview in another plan and provide greater detail in this plan. References from these other plans to the Requirements Management Plan may be useful.  This often works well on large projects with a separate organization that is responsible for managing requirements.
• Tailor the document sections to cover only those areas that are not covered elsewhere.

The following is a mapping of Requirements Management Plan sections to artifacts that may contain complementary information:

Tool Considerations

Rather than document the traceability attributes and their usage into a formal Requirements Management Plan, you may choose to enter this information directly into an online help tool or Web site, or into the tool that you use for managing attributes and traceability.

The Requirements Management Plan is often used to document more than just traceability items.  For example, users of Rational RequisitePro often use this document to capture other items managed by the tool, such as action items, glossary terms, and so forth.

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