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Wikipedia defines requirements management as “the process of documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing and agreeing on requirements and then controlling change and communicating to relevant stakeholders.” The main objective of requirements management is to ensure that the project succeeds in meeting the requirements of the customers as well as that of internal or external stakeholders. Before proceeding further let’s look at some statistics with respect to requirements management. * Poorly defined applications contribute to a 66% project failure rate, costing U.S. businesses at least $30 billion every year (Forrester Research) * 50 - 80% of project defects stem from poor requirements management * 31% of projects are cancelled before they are completed * 53% of projects take more time to complete and costs twice as of their original estimates * The success rate for IT projects is less than 30% * Organizations with poor requirements management processes have three times as many project failures as successes. Thus, one of the major causes for project delays and budget overruns is requirements management issues. This includes incomplete, missing, or poorly documented requirements, requirements creep, impossible to satisfy requirements and requirements that failed to meet the needs of the user. With requirements management playing such an important role in the success of any software project, it is necessary that enterprises use requirements management tools to get a top-quality application that matches what the user asked for and complies with all internal and external requirements. A good requirements management tool helps software development team to * Capture a set of requirements, collaborate on their development, and trace implementation back to specs * Collaborate on managing requirements locally or globally * Work from the same playbook, no matter where they are located * Set up an excellent system of capturing customer inputs both for new product ideas as well as improvements of existing products * Evaluate and prioritize requirements for releases * Formalize and automate requirements management and enable reuse of requirements * Reduce testing time and cut down reworking on the application (after system testing) by having one version of the truth captured and shared globally by all developers * Improve team collaboration and communication * Manage regulatory compliance automatically * Upgrade to the complete ALM solution * Integrate with other tools easily Thus, with a best of the breed requirements management tool, enterprises can ensure that there are no delays and costly last minute surprises - whether the project was developed in the office next door, or by an offshore partner 10,000 miles and 10 time zones away. Read more about- traceability matrix, software development life cycle
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requirements management, requirements management tools, ALM, traceability matrix, software development life cycle,
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