The Essential Guide to Requirements Management and Traceability
Chapters
- 1. Requirements Management
- Overview
- 1 What is Requirements Management?
- 2 Why do you need Requirements Management?
- 3 Four Fundamentals of Requirements Management
- 4 Adopting an Agile Approach to Requirements Management
- 5 Status Request Changes
- 6 Conquering the 5 Biggest Challenges of Requirements Management
- 7 Three Reasons You Need a Requirements Management Solution
- 2. Writing Requirements
- Overview
- 1 Functional requirements examples and templates
- 2 Identifying and Measuring Requirements Quality
- 3 How to write system requirement specification (SRS) documents
- 4 The Fundamentals of Business Requirements: Examples of Business Requirements and the Importance of Excellence
- 5 Adopting the EARS Notation to Improve Requirements Engineering
- 6 Jama Connect Advisor™
- 7 Frequently Asked Questions about the EARS Notation and Jama Connect Advisor™
- 8 How to Write an Effective Product Requirements Document (PRD)
- 9 Functional vs. Non-Functional Requirements
- 10 What Are Nonfunctional Requirements and How Do They Impact Product Development?
- 11 Characteristics of Effective Software Requirements and Software Requirements Specifications (SRS)
- 12 8 Do’s and Don’ts for Writing Requirements
- 3. Requirements Gathering and Management Processes
- Overview
- 1 Requirements Engineering
- 2 Requirements Analysis
- 3 A Guide to Requirements Elicitation for Product Teams
- 4 Requirements Gathering Techniques for Agile Product Teams
- 5 What is Requirements Gathering?
- 6 Defining and Implementing a Requirements Baseline
- 7 Managing Project Scope — Why It Matters and Best Practices
- 8 How Long Do Requirements Take?
- 4. Requirements Traceability
- Overview
- 1 What is Traceability?
- 2 Tracing Your Way to Success: The Crucial Role of Traceability in Modern Product and Systems Development
- 3 Change Impact Analysis (CIA): A Short Guide for Effective Implementation
- 4 What is Requirements Traceability and Why Does It Matter for Product Teams?
- 5 Key Traceability Challenges and Tips for Ensuring Accountability and Efficiency
- 6 Unraveling the Digital Thread: Enhancing Connectivity and Efficiency
- 7 The Role of a Data Thread in Product and Software Development
- 8 How to Create and Use a Requirements Traceability Matrix
- 9 Traceability Matrix 101: Why It’s Not the Ultimate Solution for Managing Requirements
- 10 Live Traceability vs. After-the-Fact Traceability
- 11 How to Overcome Organizational Barriers to Live Requirements Traceability
- 12 Requirements Traceability, What Are You Missing?
- 13 Four Best Practices for Requirements Traceability
- 14 Requirements Traceability: Links in the Chain
- 15 What Are the Benefits of End-to-End Traceability During Product Development?
- 5. Requirements Management Tools and Software
- Overview
- 1 Selecting the Right Requirements Management Tools and Software
- 2 Why Investing in Requirements Management Software Makes Business Sense During an Economic Downturn
- 3 Why Word and Excel Alone is Not Enough for Product, Software, and Systems Development
- 4 Application lifecycle management (ALM)
- 5 Is There Life After DOORS®?
- 6 Checklist: Selecting a Requirements Management Tool
- 6. Requirements Validation and Verification
- 7. Meeting Regulatory Compliance and Industry Standards
- Overview
- 1 Understanding ISO Standards
- 2 Understanding ISO/IEC 27001: A Guide to Information Security Management
- 3 What is DevSecOps? A Guide to Building Secure Software
- 4 Compliance Management
- 5 What is FMEA? Failure Modes and Effects Analysis
- 6 TÜV SÜD: Ensuring Safety, Quality, and Sustainability Worldwide
- 8. Systems Engineering
- 9. Automotive Development
- 10. Medical Device & Life Sciences Development
- Overview
- 1 The Importance of Benefit-Risk Analysis in Medical Device Development
- 2 Software as a Medical Device: Revolutionizing Healthcare
- 3 What’s a Design History File, and How Are DHFs Used by Product Teams?
- 4 Navigating the Risks of Software of Unknown Pedigree (SOUP) in the Medical Device & Life Sciences Industry
- 5 What is ISO 13485? Your Comprehensive Guide to Compliant Medical Device Manufacturing
- 6 What You Need to Know: ANSI/AAMI SW96:2023 — Medical Device Security
- 7 ISO 13485 vs ISO 9001: Understanding the Differences and Synergies
- 8 Failure Modes, Effects, and Diagnostic Analysis (FMEDA) for Medical Devices: What You Need to Know
- 9 Embracing the Future of Healthcare: Exploring the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)
- 11. Aerospace & Defense Development
- 12. Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC industry) Development
- Glossary
Chapter 1: Status Request Changes
Chapters
- 1. Requirements Management
- Overview
- 1 What is Requirements Management?
- 2 Why do you need Requirements Management?
- 3 Four Fundamentals of Requirements Management
- 4 Adopting an Agile Approach to Requirements Management
- 5 Status Request Changes
- 6 Conquering the 5 Biggest Challenges of Requirements Management
- 7 Three Reasons You Need a Requirements Management Solution
- 2. Writing Requirements
- Overview
- 1 Functional requirements examples and templates
- 2 Identifying and Measuring Requirements Quality
- 3 How to write system requirement specification (SRS) documents
- 4 The Fundamentals of Business Requirements: Examples of Business Requirements and the Importance of Excellence
- 5 Adopting the EARS Notation to Improve Requirements Engineering
- 6 Jama Connect Advisor™
- 7 Frequently Asked Questions about the EARS Notation and Jama Connect Advisor™
- 8 How to Write an Effective Product Requirements Document (PRD)
- 9 Functional vs. Non-Functional Requirements
- 10 What Are Nonfunctional Requirements and How Do They Impact Product Development?
- 11 Characteristics of Effective Software Requirements and Software Requirements Specifications (SRS)
- 12 8 Do’s and Don’ts for Writing Requirements
- 3. Requirements Gathering and Management Processes
- Overview
- 1 Requirements Engineering
- 2 Requirements Analysis
- 3 A Guide to Requirements Elicitation for Product Teams
- 4 Requirements Gathering Techniques for Agile Product Teams
- 5 What is Requirements Gathering?
- 6 Defining and Implementing a Requirements Baseline
- 7 Managing Project Scope — Why It Matters and Best Practices
- 8 How Long Do Requirements Take?
- 4. Requirements Traceability
- Overview
- 1 What is Traceability?
- 2 Tracing Your Way to Success: The Crucial Role of Traceability in Modern Product and Systems Development
- 3 Change Impact Analysis (CIA): A Short Guide for Effective Implementation
- 4 What is Requirements Traceability and Why Does It Matter for Product Teams?
- 5 Key Traceability Challenges and Tips for Ensuring Accountability and Efficiency
- 6 Unraveling the Digital Thread: Enhancing Connectivity and Efficiency
- 7 The Role of a Data Thread in Product and Software Development
- 8 How to Create and Use a Requirements Traceability Matrix
- 9 Traceability Matrix 101: Why It’s Not the Ultimate Solution for Managing Requirements
- 10 Live Traceability vs. After-the-Fact Traceability
- 11 How to Overcome Organizational Barriers to Live Requirements Traceability
- 12 Requirements Traceability, What Are You Missing?
- 13 Four Best Practices for Requirements Traceability
- 14 Requirements Traceability: Links in the Chain
- 15 What Are the Benefits of End-to-End Traceability During Product Development?
- 5. Requirements Management Tools and Software
- Overview
- 1 Selecting the Right Requirements Management Tools and Software
- 2 Why Investing in Requirements Management Software Makes Business Sense During an Economic Downturn
- 3 Why Word and Excel Alone is Not Enough for Product, Software, and Systems Development
- 4 Application lifecycle management (ALM)
- 5 Is There Life After DOORS®?
- 6 Checklist: Selecting a Requirements Management Tool
- 6. Requirements Validation and Verification
- 7. Meeting Regulatory Compliance and Industry Standards
- Overview
- 1 Understanding ISO Standards
- 2 Understanding ISO/IEC 27001: A Guide to Information Security Management
- 3 What is DevSecOps? A Guide to Building Secure Software
- 4 Compliance Management
- 5 What is FMEA? Failure Modes and Effects Analysis
- 6 TÜV SÜD: Ensuring Safety, Quality, and Sustainability Worldwide
- 8. Systems Engineering
- 9. Automotive Development
- 10. Medical Device & Life Sciences Development
- Overview
- 1 The Importance of Benefit-Risk Analysis in Medical Device Development
- 2 Software as a Medical Device: Revolutionizing Healthcare
- 3 What’s a Design History File, and How Are DHFs Used by Product Teams?
- 4 Navigating the Risks of Software of Unknown Pedigree (SOUP) in the Medical Device & Life Sciences Industry
- 5 What is ISO 13485? Your Comprehensive Guide to Compliant Medical Device Manufacturing
- 6 What You Need to Know: ANSI/AAMI SW96:2023 — Medical Device Security
- 7 ISO 13485 vs ISO 9001: Understanding the Differences and Synergies
- 8 Failure Modes, Effects, and Diagnostic Analysis (FMEDA) for Medical Devices: What You Need to Know
- 9 Embracing the Future of Healthcare: Exploring the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)
- 11. Aerospace & Defense Development
- 12. Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC industry) Development
- Glossary
Status Request Changes
This article continues the exploration of requirements-related metrics in Measuring Requirements: Product Size and Requirements Quality, and expands on status request changes.
Requirements Status
In this chapter, we expand on handling requirement additions, modifications, and deletions in status request changes.
Track the status of each requirement over time to monitor overall project status, perhaps defining a requirement attribute to store this information. Status tracking can help you avoid the pervasive “ninety percent done” problem of software project tracking. Each requirement will have one of the following statuses at any time.
- Proposed (someone suggested it)
- Approved (it was allocated to a baseline)
- Implemented (the code was designed, written, and unit tested)
- Verified (the requirement passed its tests after integration into the product)
- Deferred (the requirement will be implemented in a future release)
- Deleted (you decided not to implement it at all)
- Rejected (the idea was never approved)
Other status options are possible, of course. Some organizations use a status of “Reviewed” because they want to confirm that a requirement is of high quality before allocating it to a baseline. Other organizations use “Delivered to Customer” to indicate that a requirement has actually been released.
When you ask a developer how he is coming along, he might say, “Of the eighty-seven requirements allocated to this subsystem, sixty-one of them are verified, nine are implemented but not yet verified, and seventeen aren’t yet completely implemented.” There’s a good chance that not all these requirements are the same size, will consume the same amount of implementation effort, or will deliver the same customer value. If I were a project manager, though, I’d feel that we had a good handle on the size of that subsystem and how close we were to completion. This is far more informative than, “I’m about ninety percent done. Lookin’ good!”
RELATED ARTICLE: Identifying and Measuring the Quality of Requirements
Requests for Changes
Much of requirements management involves handling requirement additions, modifications, and deletions. Therefore, track the status and impact of your requirements change requests. The data you collect should let your team answer questions such as the following:
- How many change requests were submitted in a given time period?
- How many of these requests are open, and how many are closed?
- How many requests were approved, and how many were rejected?
- How much effort did the team spend implementing each approved change?
- How long have the requests been open on average?
- On average, how many individual requirements or other artifacts are affected by each submitted change request?
Monitor how many changes are incorporated throughout development after you baselined the requirements for a specific release. Note that a single change request potentially can affect multiple requirements of different levels and types (user requirements, functional requirements, nonfunctional requirements). To calculate requirements volatility over a given time period, divide the number of changes by the total number of requirements at the beginning of the period (for example, at the time a baseline was defined):
The intent is not to try to eliminate requirements volatility. There are often good reasons to change requirements. However, we need to ensure that the project can manage the degree of requirements changes and still meet its commitments. Changes become more expensive as the product nears completion, and a sustained high level of approved change requests makes it difficult to know when you can ship the product. Most projects should become more resistant to making changes as development progresses, meaning the trend of accepted changes should approach zero as you near the planned completion date for a given release. An iterative development approach gives the team multiple opportunities to incorporate changes into subsequent iterations, while still keeping each iteration on schedule.
If you receive many change requests, that suggests that elicitation overlooked many requirements or that new ideas keep coming in as the project drags along month after month. Record where the change requests come from: marketing, users, sales, management, developers, and so on. The change request origins will tell you who to work with to reduce the number of overlooked, modified, and misunderstood requirements.
Change requests that remain unresolved for a long time suggest that your change management process isn’t working well. I once visited a company where a manager wryly admitted that they had enhancement requests that were several years old and still pending. This team should allocate certain of their open requests to specific planned maintenance releases and convert other long-term deferred change requests to a status of rejected. This would help the project manager focus the team’s energy on the most important and most urgent items in the change backlog.
Effort
Finally, I recommend that you record the time your team spends on requirements engineering activities. These activities include both requirements development (getting and writing good requirements) and requirements management (dealing with change, tracking status, recording traceability data, and so on).
I’m frequently asked how much time and effort a project should allocate to these functions. The answer depends enormously on the type and size of project, the developing team and organization, and the application domain. If you track your own team’s investment in these critical project activities, you can better estimate how much effort to plan for future projects.
Suppose that on one previous project, your team expended ten percent of its effort on requirements activities. In retrospect, you conclude that the requirements were too poorly defined and the project would have benefited from additional investment in developing quality requirements. The next time your team tackles a similar project, the project manager would be wise to allocate more than ten percent of the total project effort to the requirements work.
As you accumulate data, correlate the project development effort with some measure of product size. The documented requirements should give you an indication of size. You could correlate effort with the count of individually testable requirements, use case points, function points, or something else that is proportional to product size. As Figure 1 illustrates, such correlations provide a measure of your development team’s productivity, which will help you estimate and scope individual release contents. If you collect some product size data and track the corresponding implementation effort, you’ll be in a better position to create meaningful estimates for similar projects in the future.
Some people are afraid that launching a software measurement effort will consume too much time, time they feel should be spent doing “real work.” My experience, though, is that a sensible and focused metrics program doesn’t take much time or effort at all. It’s mostly a matter of developing a simple infrastructure for collecting and analyzing the data, and getting team members in the habit of recording some key bits of data about their work. Once you’ve developed a measurement culture in your organization, you’ll be surprised how much you can learn from the data.
RELATED ARTICLE: Product Size Requirements Quality
Jama Software has partnered with Karl Wiegers to share licensed content from his books and articles on our web site via a series of blog posts, whitepapers and webinars. Karl Wiegers is an independent consultant and not an employee of Jama. He can be reached at http://www.processimpact.com. Enjoy these free requirements management resources.
In This Webinar, Learn More About the High Cost of Poor Requirements Management
A Change Request is a formal proposal for an alteration to some product or system. In project management, a change request often arises when the client wants an addition or alteration to the agreed-upon deliverables for a project.
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