Task: Develop Requirements Management Plan
This task describes how to develop a plan for documenting requirements, their attributes and guidelines for traceability and management of product requirements.
Purpose

The purpose of this task is to develop a Requirements Management Plan that specifies the information and control mechanisms which will be collected and used for measuring, reporting, and controlling changes to the product requirements. 

Relationships
RolesMain: Additional: Assisting:
InputsMandatory: Optional: External:
  • None
Outputs
Main Description
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
  • 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.

Steps
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 Concept: Traceability.

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

Choose Requirements Attributes

Requirements 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 work product or work product 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 provide links between design elements using Unified Modeling Language (UML), and manage attributes such as "Description", "Persistency", and so on.

For guidance on linking information across tools, see associated tool mentors.

Write the Plan

Requirements Management Plan describes the necessary input for an effective plan. The provided information 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 the following: Guideline: Requirements Management Plan.



Properties
Multiple Occurrences
Event Driven
Ongoing
Optional
Planned
Repeatable
More Information