While Agile methods are becoming more and more popular in Software Development shops, Requirements Management is a formal discipline widely adopted and adapted in System Engineering and in general inside those companies that have to comply with strict regulations and norms.
The Formal Requirements Process
The formal requirements process evolved first in industries such as the military aerospace and automotive sectors where organizations are subject to strict regulatory compliance and to external quality pressures. Projects are typically large in scale, and span longer time periods – months to years, involve large teams of staff (tens of hundreds of engineers, software developers, project management experts, stakeholders) and the products under development frequently have software and hardware components that must move forward in parallel.
The product development process here is typically quite linear (Waterfall) in nature. Requirements are elicited by requirements engineers in a formalized way – using an established methodology for specifying requirements such as Volere. Information is captured through JAD sessions, meetings, interviews, and questionnaires, involving multiple stakeholders and external partners and gathered through elicitation and is captured in meeting minutes, and then copied onto individual cards or recorded into a requirements management system. Requirements analysts may also leverage requirements elicitation tools, modeling tools such as UML diagrams, block/ball/comic diagrams, mash ups, mind maps, technical diagrams and schemas to round out a picture of the system being designed. Change to requirements within specification documents can be difficult to manage, especially when they occur at a fast rate or in high volumes.
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