Requirements Management
Learning Objectives
- You know what requirements management is and why it is needed.
Requirements are managed throughout the software development life cycle. The requirements are managed to ensure that the requirements are up-to-date and that they can be changed and prioritized to match customer’s needs throughout the project. Software requirements specification documents typically include a version history that highlights the changes made to the requirements. However, requirements management can also be done using a requirements management tool or a project management tool.
There exists a wide variety of tools for managing requirements, ranging from the use of a simple spreadsheet to the use of a dedicated requirements management tool. The choice of tool depends on the size of the project, the number of requirements, the number of stakeholders, and the number of people working on the project. For example, a small project with a small number of requirements and a small number of stakeholders can use a simple spreadsheet such as Google Sheets to manage the requirements. However, a large project with a large number of requirements and a large number of stakeholders likely need a dedicated requirements management tool.
On a daily basis, developers may not work with the requirements management tool or the requirements document per se, but focus on the project e.g. using a Kanban board, also maintaining a separate prioritized backlog of requirements.
Depending on how and where requirements are managed, large language models can be included to the process, for example, to run automatic checks for inconsistencies or ambiguities in the requirements. At the same time, if the requirements are managed in a tool — or without a tool — that is not accessible to a large language model, integrating large language models to the process would first require changing the process how requirements are managed.