What Can Requirements Management Tools Do
From Requirements Management School
Requirement management tools come in many different flavors.
There is a solution out there that will meet the needs of almost every organization. There are a wide variety of solutions out there from desktop applications to fully hosted on-demand/SaaS web-based solutions to traditional enterprise software solutions. You can also tailor many of the packages to suit your needs by picking and choosing between various features.
Here are the most common features of requirements management tools:
- Requirements:
- Creation
- Updating
- Assignment
- Task generation
- Tracking
- Version control
- Bidirectional traceability
- Requirement attributes:
- Creation
- Updating
- Tracking
- Generation of reports and documentation:
- SRS
- MRD
- PRD
- FSD
- Management of use cases:
- Creation
- Users/actors
- Assignment of requirements
- Monitoring reports e.g. attributes and requirements
- Bidirectional traceability matrices
- Document repository and full version control:
- Uploading of documents or files to populate the requirements. CSV files are great in this respect but remember if parsing a document the quality of the data that you upload into the database will only be as good as the consistency of your document.
- Change control management:
- Requests
- Review
- Impact analysis
- Approval process
- Users:
- Permission based user/stakeholder groups
- Assignment of roles and tasks
- Projects:
- Single project set ups
- Multiple project set ups
- Phased implementations
- Workflow for various types of approvals and communication
- Test case management
- Issue and defects log management
- Self-contained project email system or threaded conversation system so that everything pertaining to the project is stored in one place
As you can see, requirements management tools can give you a lot of choices. It is important to carry out plenty of research into which tool will suit your organization best. Taking into account the scalability of the product is very important because you do not want to have to be changing from one solution to another in order to meet growing needs.
Many of the tools stand up very well to cost benefits analysis. The proviso to this is if your choice of solution is inappropriate to the project needs/size.
