RequirementsManagement

Requirements management is the systematic process of capturing, documenting, analyzing, monitoring, and controlling requirements throughout a system's or product's lifecycle. It aims to ensure that stakeholder needs are translated into workable specifications and that changes are managed consistently.

Core activities include elicitation, analysis, and documentation; requirement specification (functional and non-functional), prioritization, and validation; tracing to design artifacts and test cases; change management; baselining and version control; impact analysis of proposed changes.

It interfaces with systems engineering, software development, test, and project management. It often uses a requirements repository or toolset to maintain a single source of truth, support bidirectional traceability, baselines, and release planning. Modeling techniques such as use cases, user stories, or data models may be used.

Standards and guidance include IEEE 29148 family standards for requirements engineering; ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148; IREB and INCOSE handbooks. Common practice emphasizes traceability matrices, clear acceptance criteria, and measurable requirements.

Benefits include improved alignment with stakeholder needs, reduced scope creep, better risk management, and higher traceability and testability. Challenges include ambiguity in requirements, changing priorities, incomplete elicitation, tool complexity, and coordinating distributed stakeholders.

See also: requirements engineering, traceability, change management.