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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 purpose of requirements management is to establish and maintain agreement between the customer and the project team about the needs and expectations of the customers and the changes to those requirements. Out of all phases of software development life cycle, requirements management occupies the top slot in the priority list of the software development team. This is because poor, unclear, changing, unmet and misunderstood requirements lead to delivered defects, project overshoot, project failures and increased cost burden. Hence, requirements management is highly essential to develop a successful solution that meets customer needs, and to deliver it on time and within budget. Another important reason for project failures and cost overruns is the practice of using text documents for requirements management. One of the drawbacks of such text-based documents is the inability of the software development team to elicit clearly the various requirements and keep the project stakeholders, end users, project managers, developers, and testers informed about the requirement status and the change in requirements with respect to schedules, functionality and costs. This calls for best of the breed requirements management tools that can help teams working in various geographic locations to achieve collaborative requirements management with high degree of reusability that can substantially reduce the development time and risks. These tools developed by the leading service providers in application lifecycle management is an "anytime anywhere requirements" management, gathering and analysis application that helps the distantly located team members share project objectives and deliverables. It also provides proactive analysis reports of the traceability matrix and traceability relation network. A best of the breed tool provides a rich and configurable, global platform for capturing a set of requirements, collaborating on their development, and tracing implementation back to specs. The diverse team members (customers, analysts, software architects and designers) share project goals and deliverables to collaborate on managing requirements locally or globally. Thus, the requirements management tool ensures that all developers are working from the same playbook, no matter where they are located, and that there are no 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. Here is a look at some of the significant features of the requirements management tool : • Supports requirements management of many flavors - standard as well as proprietary methodologies or processes • The capabilities necessary for effective and effortless Requirements Management are built-in and are accessible through a highly user-friendly interface. • Requirements gathering, parsing, management, traceability, base lining and intelligent reporting in a process-driven, methodology, enables project teams to effectively manage and map requirements Thus, an effective requirements management tool helps to develop a top-quality application that matches what the user asked for and complies with all internal and external requirements. Related Links - Agile Methodology
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software development life cycle, requirements management tools, application lifecycle management, traceability matrix, Agile Methodology,
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