What is Requirements Management?

What is requirements management?

Requirements management gathers, analyzes, confirms, and documents business, market, and user needs for product development. Gathering requirements involves research and engagement with stakeholders. The data is analyzed to identify patterns, prioritize needs, and determine potential integration into products. Stakeholder feedback and validation confirm that the data represents their needs. Documented requirements serve as a guide to product scope, as well as a basis for future decision-making.

Why is requirements management important?

Requirements management enables organizations to transform good ideas into breakthrough products by considering all relevant functional, performance, safety, regulatory, and market needs. Mature requirements management practices provide a foundation for product excellence.

Who is responsible for requirements management?

Every organization has a unique approach to making product and project decisions. Often, a portfolio team will analyze trends, define investment themes, and define the high-level vision of a product. This vision is refined over time as product, software, and systems engineers conduct further analysis within their domains of expertise, adding more detailed specifications. Regulatory teams may contribute regulatory requirements. From initial ideation through product delivery, requirements will change as user and market needs evolve or become better defined. Requirements management is an iterative and fluid process with many stakeholders.

What are the stages of the requirements management process?

Requirements management stages vary from organization to organization, but typically include the following:

Organizations decide how teams will analyze, document, validate, and govern changes to requirements, working within Agile, V-model, or other processes.

Over many iterations, requirements or epics evolve from high-level vision to detailed requirements and user stories, with success criteria defined via associated test cases.

Teams work to ensure that documented requirements meet market and user needs and make changes to requirements as appropriate.

As the product takes shape, teams test it to verify that each iteration meets the documented specifications.

The ultimate aim is to deliver a product or service that satisfies the requirements agreed to so that requirements engineering naturally flows into the design and manufacture or implementation.

Benefits of requirements management

Sound requirements management is a foundational discipline for product, systems, and software engineering teams. Organizations with mature requirements management practices:

Build products that better meet market needs, achieving competitive advantage

Reduce rework from missed or poor-quality requirements, shortening product cycles

Create a more accurate, shared product vision more quickly, speeding product delivery

Enhance reuse, reducing development costs

Explore Codebeamer Codebeamer helps engineers connect people, processes, and tools with requirements workflows allowing for traceability, transparency, and advanced change and configuration management.

Explore Windchill Windchill, PTC's PLM solution, offers a scalable repository that can be customized for valuable requirements and validation assets addressing complex product manufacturing challenges.

Requirements management best practices

Requirements management frequently asked questions

Requirements management is dedicated to eliciting, analyzing, and documenting business, user, and market needs. Project management is a more generalized discipline that can be applied to a broad range of deliverables, not limited to requirements.

Common requirements management challenges include:

Confirmation bias. We all tend to interpret information in a way that confirms or supports our existing beliefs. Truly listening to customers with an open mind is actually challenging.
Complexity. Today’s highly engineered products can be associated with thousands of individual requirements. Without the right toolset, it's easy to get lost in the details, and simply finding the right set of information to work with can become a monumental task. This is why it's so critical to provide a toolset that organizes requirements information into well-organized hierarchies and logical groups that automatically associate work items with relevant requirements information.
Siloed organizations. Large and distributed teams can make it more challenging to develop and implement a shared vision. While transparent access to documents is crucial, it's also important to bring people together to foster a collaborative working environment.

Common requirements categories include:

Functional requirements define product functions or capabilities
Nonfunctional requirements specify general attributes or performance needs such as speed, torque, weight, etc.
Safety requirements define how the product will perform in response to specific hazards or threats
Regulatory requirements must be in compliance to sell into specific industries, geographies, or markets

User stories are a requirements elicitation technique used by Agile teams that captures needs and wants from the user's point of view, typically using first-person “I need, I see” narration. User stories are an excellent way to build an understanding of the user's world and empathize with their challenges. Epics organize multiple user stories under a common theme.