Activity:  Develop Requirements Management Plan

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

Before you start to describe the project requirements, you must decide how to document and organize them, as well as how to use requirements attributes when managing the requirements throughout the project lifecycle.

Choosing the appropriate attributes and traceability for your project requirements will assist you to:

• Assess the project impact of a change in a requirement
• Assess the impact of a failure of a test on requirements (i.e. if test fails the requirement may not be satisfied)
• Manage the scope of the project
• Verify that all requirements of the system are fulfilled by the implementation.
• Verify that the application does only what it was intended to do.
• Manage change.

Document all decisions regarding requirements documents, traceability items (see traceability and requirement types), guidelines and strategies for requirements attributes in the Requirements Management Plan.

Establish Traceability

You must first identify the traceability items between which you wish to establish traceability links. The most important traceability items, and the typical traceability between them, are described in Concepts: Traceability.

The result is documented in a set of requirements traceability matrices, which are part of the Requirements Attributes artifact.

Choose Requirements Attributes

Attributes are used to track information associated with a traceability item, typically for status and reporting purposes.  The essential attributes to track are Risk, Benefit, Effort, Stability and Architectural Impact, in order to permit prioritizing requirements for scope management and to assign requirements to iterations.

Map to Tools

Traceability and attributes are general concepts that can apply to any artifact or artifact element.  However, a typical project will have scheduling and budgeting tools, design tools, requirements management tools, and configuration management tools.  These tools often provide and/or impose certain attributes and traceability.

For example, scheduling tools typically provide links between people and tasks, and manage attributes such as percent complete.  The link from task to requirement may be implicit via naming convention, or may be managed explicitly.

Design tools, such as Rational Rose, provide links between design elements using Unified Modeling Language (UML), and manage attributes such as "Description", "Persistency", and so on.

Some guidance for linking information across tools is provided by the following tool mentors:

• Managing Uses Cases using Rational Rose and Rational RequisitePro
• Managing Stakeholder Requests using Rational ClearQuest and Rational RequisitePro

Write the Plan

The Artifact: Requirements Management Plan describes the necessary input for an effective plan. The template is intended to serve as a guideline. The intent of each section should be addressed within the context of a given project/product.  Detailed guidelines are provided by Guidelines: Requirements Management Plan.

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