Requirements management
Requirements Management (AM, English requirements management, RM) is a branch of Requirements Engineering (RE ) and a branch of business analysis and management responsibility for the efficient and error-free development of complex systems.
Other disciplines of RE are eg the requirement definition and this includes the subregions requirements elicitation (English requirements elicitation ), requirements documentation (English requirements documentation) and request validation (English requirements validation ), while demand management measures to manage, control and management of requirements, ie risk management, change management and implementation of management includes.
This definition supports the findings from the past into account that problems with requirements mostly from a lack of management precisely this result. It has become the knowledge matured, that alone imposing requirements is not sufficient, but for the realization of a product or system the further process of requirements management is necessary.
Objectives
Requirements management is especially important here, where complex products and systems are designed and worked very labor on their development.
The objective of requirements management is to achieve a common understanding of a system to be developed between contractor and client. At the same time, the resulting documents often serve as contractual basis for further implementation.
A common understanding can be achieved through the adoption and implementation of requirements management methods (a. scoping, requirements analysis, requirements specification, requirements analysis, requirements modeling, requirements reviews below). By using these methods, the quality of the requirements documentation can be increased. Quality criteria for requirements documentation thereof include comprehensibility, clarity, traceability, consistency, completeness, testability.
The management of requirements means that processes are defined and implemented by the request documentation is updated throughout the course of the project and this can be used at the end as a basis for the preparation of test cases.
Standards and language
Requirements management is one of the elementary processes in the software and system maturity models CMMI and ISO / IEC 15504 (SPICE ) and in the standard ISO / IEC 12207th
It used to represent the natural language, or if necessary a formalized natural language with limited vocabulary and sentence construction firm, called the Requirements templates. The artificial languages are also used increasingly for modeling such as UML or Message Sequence Charts (MSC ) easier in many situations, a formulation of the requirements.
Goal of requirements specification (among specifications, requirements specification, requirements definition, ...) to formulate the requirements so that between the principal and agent is created a common understanding about the system being developed is. To achieve this in natural language rules should be adhered to. Here, for example, recommended to use short sentences and not to use imprecise adjectives and adverbs (so-called "weak words ", engl. Weak words such as faster, more beautiful, automatic, circa, ... ). An author of a specification should adhere to these rules in order to improve the quality of requirements. In order for the author to comply with these rules, there are also software tools that can help him.
In Germany, a standard for uniform exchange of requirements has been established, called the Requirements Interchange Format ( ReqIF, formerly RIF). ReqIF is defined by an XML schema, and is a format and data model structures for requests whose attributes, types, access rights, relations ( links ), etc. contains. The WIP project group was launched in 2004 as part of the manufacturer Initiative Software ( HIS) by German carmakers like Audi, BMW, Daimler, Porsche and Volkswagen. Reason was the need to exchange requirements between different partners, which use different RM tools.
Application
Requirements may in requirements management not only make statements about desired properties, but have to describe parallel criteria, how these properties can be checked ( acceptance criteria).
These are often referred to as test cases criteria are not only the quality of the product, but essentially the quality of the requirements themselves, as comprises providing an acceptance criterion forcing an immediate substantive review of the request.
Requirements management software
In order to structure the requirements management better to reduce redundancies and to allow Versions-/Konfigurationsmanagement and traceability software is used for requirements management. This software should then be shareable. Standard word processing programs are often used in place of this special software, but what then can lead to the problems mentioned above.
The software is based in most cases on a database that stores the individual requirements and can be tracked and monitored their execution in the sequence. For each requirement, the start of processing, the achievement of milestones and the (successful ) completion of the work is noted.
This requirement management software allows most of these databases, to set requirements in relationship. Thus, for example, then the system requests are returned to customer requirements and are thus registered, inter alia, system requirements, which are attributable to any customer requirements, in order to avoid over engineering. The same tests can be set in relation to the requirements in order to ensure completeness of the test.