Documenting and Managing Requirements

Requirements are the foundation for ensuring that a project deliverable supports the needs that justified the project. Each captured requirement should include an attribute that provides 'backward' traceability to the source of the requirement.

Once requirements are approved, other project artifacts will be generated. There is a correspondence between the requirements and project work. For IT projects, the requirements will be allocated to different areas of the designed deliverable. For non-IT projects, the requirements also must be satisfied by project deliverables. Quality testing and user documentation and training also are derived from the requirements. Traceability, from the original project documents through the project life cycle to the implemented solution, should be supported in the captured requirements and other project artifacts.

The diagram the 'forward' traceability from requirement sources, through the design of the deliverable, test scripts for the project's QA process, and end user documentation. The flow can be reversed to review the 'backward' traceability path. Using a methodology that supports this tracing capability provides the means to ensure that the project deliverables support all the identified project needs and goals.

Traceability is usually presented using a matrix that correlates any two base-lined project artifacts. It is especially useful when determining the impact a change may generate. The Matrix at right provides an example of a Requirements Traceability matrix that might be used when assessing the impact of a requirement change to the quality testing for new development work.

In this example, a change to the functionality related to the third 'Form'-related functional requirement has the potential to affect the 23 existing functional validation tests for the Creation, Editing, and Editing/Copying form tasks.
As with the capturing of requirements, the degree to which requirements are traced should be determined by the circumstances of the project. Maintaining a very high level of traceability may be overkill when the associated effort delivers a low business value. But failure to maintain adequate traceability can easily impact the ability to remain within the cost and schedule constraints of the project.