Hi there, this is the first article on the topic of Requirements Management. Here I’ll introduce some core concepts about Requirements. Customer and Marketing requirements, Business Requirements, and a heavy focus on Engineering Requirements. Later in the series we’ll also cover voice of the customer, and introduce some additional concepts to round out effective requirements management practices. Along with techniques that you might work best for your unique business needs.
Requirements Management is the process of creating, tracing, and verifying requirements. Capturing high level buisness and customer asks with enough context to expand upon. Systematically expanding those out into more and detailed requirements and acceptance criteria.
Requirements management untimately is at the core of processes. Not only are the two interconnected, but requirements managment itself is a process, or more aptly a set of processes. Business and engineering processes, need quality requirements to function.
What is Requirements Management
Requirements Management is the process of creating, tracing, and verifying requirements. Capturing high level buisness and customer asks with enough context to expand upon. Systematically expanding those out into more and detailed requirements and acceptance criteria. Continuing this process until you have everything you need to design, implement and test a set of features for a product. The key aspects we’ll expand upon within requirement management are:
- A whole separate series on What are Requirements, Preferences, and Constraints, and when to use them.
- A Documented and repeatable method to capture requirements, relative to the detail level of the asks.
- Expanding upon requirements and accetpance critera into more detailed layers so they can be expanded upon into design and test cases.
- Documentaiton and traceability of requirements from one level to the next.
- Creating, tracing, and documenting high quality acceptance and test criteria.
- Later, we’ll delve into tools for requirements management. Putting tools first, in my experience is limiting and often times harmful to developing good requirements skills and processes
There are purists, whom I refer to as the “shalls”, that will object to the concept of preferences and constraints, particularly constraints. They typically come from high safety fields like medical, aerospace and automotive. I believe in them, and find them to be excellent tools, even in such environments. Especially as an organization grows in skill with requirements. If you encounter these individuals at your organization, continue reading, then decide how to Get Buy-In from them, so you can leverage their experience, yet build a solution that works for your group.
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