Requirements Management
For many organisations, requirements capture is often focused on funcitonal requirements, and there is often a bias towards a preferred solution. Whilst this approach may be effective for smaller projects and teams, it does not scale well to larger endeavours and those involving multiple sites and/or third party supplier or sub-contractor involvement in part of the work.
The 2004 Standish Group CHAOS Report survey of factors that caused projects to be challenged placed, out of 10 factors listed, Incomplete Requirements & Specifications at number 2 and Changing Requirements & Specifications at number 3. Clearly, requirements play a big role in project success, but from this survey it is clear that it is managing requirements that is important.
To manage requirements, and particularly to manage changing requirements, organising them in some form that allows impact analysis, coverage analysis and control of scope is required. Such an approach is taken by the Requirements discipline in IBM RUP®. RUP's Requirements discipline provides a process for managing requirements through a hierarchical organisation:-
- Problem Statement - gaining a common understanding of the problems being solved amongst stakeholders
- Stakeholder Needs - eliciting the stakeholders requirements and rationlising them into granular needs
- Features - agreeing the features of a good solution
- Use Cases - identifying the functional requirements by the way the system will be used
- Supplementary Specificationscapturing non-functional requirements
Team members require this skill to successfully perform the following roles: System Analyst and Requirements Specifier.
This skill is taught as part of the following courses:-
Users require this skill to gain the full benefits from the following tools:-