Work Product (Artifact): Requirements Management Plan
This artifact describes the requirements artifacts, requirement types, and their respective requirements attributes, specifying the information to be collected and control mechanisms to be used for measuring, reporting, and controlling changes to the product requirements.
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 and manage the requirements work products, associated requirement types (see Concept: Types of Requirements), requirement attributes (see Artifact: Requirements Attributes). The plan also addresses how traceability (see Concept: Traceability) will be managed.

Relationships
RolesResponsible: Modified By:
Input ToMandatory: Optional:
  • None
External:
  • None
Output From
Properties
Optional
PlannedYes
Illustrations
Tailoring
Representation Options

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 work products that may contain complementary information:

Requirements Management Plan Section Complementary Work product
Definitions, Acronyms, and Abbreviations  Artifact: Glossary
Organization, Responsibilities, and Interfaces  Artifact: Software Development Plan
Tools, Environment, and Infrastructure  Artifact: Development Case, Artifact: Software Development Plan (Infrastructure Plan) 
Requirements Identification  Artifact: Configuration Management Plan
Traceability  Artifact: Development Case, Measurement Plan 
Attributes  Artifact: Development Case, Artifact: Measurement Plan
Reports  Artifact: Development Case, Artifact: Measurement Plan
Requirements Change Management  Artifact: Configuration Management Plan
Workflows and Activities  Artifact: Development Case
Milestones  Artifact: Software Development Plan, Iteration Plan 
Training and Resources  Artifact: Software Development Plan 

Tool Considerations

Rather than document the traceability attributes and their intended values separately, you may choose to enter this information directly into the tool that you use for managing requirements. This would leave only their usage to be documented in the Requirements Management Plan.

Note that the Requirements Management Plan is sometimes used to document more than just the direct requirements management items. For example, users of Rational RequisitePro often use this document to capture other items managed by the tool, such as glossary terms, requirements action items and so forth. However, while RequisitePro can also be used to manage items such as risks and issues, these are treated as separate work products in RUP-the management of which is not covered in the Requirements Management Plan.



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