REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT

HOW DOES REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT WORK?
The purpose of requirements management is to ensure product development goals are successfully met. It is a set of techniques for documenting, analyzing, prioritizing, and agreeing on requirements so that engineering teams always have current and approved requirements. Requirements management provides a way to avoid errors by keeping track of changes in requirements and fostering communication with stakeholders from the start of a project throughout the engineering lifecycle.
THE IMPORTANCE OF REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT
The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing not only the way products work, but their design and development. Products are continuously becoming more complex with more lines of code and additional software — some of which allow for even greater connectivity. With requirements management, you can overcome the complexity and interdependencies that exist in today’s engineering lifecycles to streamline product development and accelerate deployment.

Issues in requirements management are often cited as major causes of project failures.
Having inadequately defined requirements can result in scope creep, project delays, cost overruns, and poor product quality that does not meet customer needs and safety requirements.

Having a requirements management plan is critical to the success of a project because it enables engineering teams to control the scope and direct the product development lifecycle. Requirements management software provides the tools for you to execute that plan, helping to reduce costs, accelerate time to market and improve quality control.
REQUIREMENT MANAGEMENT PLANNING AND PROCESS
REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT PLAN (RMP)
A requirements management plan (RMP) helps explain how you will receive, analyze, document and manage all of the requirements within a project. The plan usually covers everything from initial information gathering of the high-level project to more detailed product requirements that could be gathered throughout the lifecycle of a project. Key items to define in a requirements management plan are the project overview, requirements gathering process, roles and responsibilities, tools, and traceability.
REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT PROCESS
When looking for requirements management tools, there are a few key features to look for.
A typical requirements management process complements the systems engineering V model through these steps:
• Collect initial requirements from stakeholders
• Analyze requirements
• Define and record requirements

• Prioritize requirements
• Agree on and approve requirements
• Trace requirements to work items
• Query stakeholders after implementation on needed changes to requirements
• Utilize test management to verify and validate system requirements
• Assess impact of changes
• Revise requirements
• Document changes
By following these steps, engineering teams are able to harness the complexity inherent in developing smart connected products. Using a requirements management solution helps to streamline the process so you can optimize your speed to market and expand your opportunities while improving quality.
DIGITAL REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT
Digital requirements management is a beneficial way to capture, trace, analyze and manage requirements changes. Digital management ensures changes are tracked in a secure, central location, and it allows for strengthened collaboration between team members. Increased transparency minimizes duplicate work and enhances agility while helping to ensure requirements adhere to standards and compliance.
REQUIREMENTS ATTRIBUTES
In order to be considered a “good” requirement, a requirement should have certain characteristics, which include being:
 Specific
 Testable
 Clear and concise
 Accurate
 Understandable
 Feasible and realistic
 Necessary
Sets of requirements should also be evaluated and should be consistent and nonredundant.
BENEFITS OF REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT
Some of the benefits of requirements management include:
o Lower cost of development across the lifecycle
o Fewer defects
o Minimized risk for safety-critical products
o Faster delivery
o Reusability
o Traceability
o Requirements being tied to test cases
o Global configuration management
HOW DOES REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT WORK?
The purpose of requirements management is to ensure product development goals are successfully met. It is a set of techniques for documenting, analyzing, prioritizing, and agreeing on requirements so that engineering teams always have current and approved requirements. Requirements management provides a way to avoid errors by keeping track of changes in requirements and fostering communication with stakeholders from the start of a project throughout the engineering lifecycle.
THE IMPORTANCE OF REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT
The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing not only the way products work, but their design and development. Products are continuously becoming more complex with more lines of code and additional software — some of which allow for even greater connectivity. With requirements management, you can overcome the complexity and interdependencies that exist in today’s engineering lifecycles to streamline product development and accelerate deployment.
Issues in requirements management are often cited as major causes of project failures.
Having inadequately defined requirements can result in scope creep, project delays, cost overruns, and poor product quality that does not meet customer needs and safety requirements.
Having a requirements management plan is critical to the success of a project because it enables engineering teams to control the scope and direct the product development lifecycle. Requirements management software provides the tools for you to execute that plan, helping to reduce costs, accelerate time to market and improve quality control.
REQUIREMENTS QUALITY ASSISTANT BRINGS WATSON AI TO REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT
REQUIREMENT MANAGEMENT PLANNING AND PROCESS
REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT PLAN (RMP)
A requirements management plan (RMP) helps explain how you will receive, analyze, document and manage all of the requirements within a project. The plan usually covers everything from initial information gathering of the high-level project to more detailed product requirements that could be gathered throughout the lifecycle of a project. Key items to define in a requirements management plan are the project overview, requirements gathering process, roles and responsibilities, tools, and traceability.

REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT PROCESS
When looking for requirements management tools, there are a few key features to look for.
A typical requirements management process complements the systems engineering V model through these steps:
• Collect initial requirements from stakeholders
• Analyze requirements
• Define and record requirements
• Prioritize requirements
• Agree on and approve requirements
• Trace requirements to work items
• Query stakeholders after implementation on needed changes to requirements
• Utilize test management to verify and validate system requirements
• Assess impact of changes
• Revise requirements
• Document changes
By following these steps, engineering teams are able to harness the complexity inherent in developing smart connected products. Using a requirements management solution helps to streamline the process so you can optimize your speed to market and expand your opportunities while improving quality.
DIGITAL REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT
Digital requirements management is a beneficial way to capture, trace, analyze and manage requirements changes. Digital management ensures changes are tracked in a secure, central location, and it allows for strengthened collaboration between team members. Increased transparency minimizes duplicate work and enhances agility while helping to ensure requirements adhere to standards and compliance.
REQUIREMENTS ATTRIBUTES
In order to be considered a “good” requirement, a requirement should have certain characteristics, which include being:
Specific
Testable
Clear and concise
Accurate
Understandable
Feasible and realistic
Necessary
Sets of requirements should also be evaluated and should be consistent and no redundant.
BENEFITS OF REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT
Some of the benefits of requirements management include:
 Lower cost of development across the lifecycle
 Fewer defects
 Minimized risk for safety-critical products
 Faster delivery
 Reusability
 Traceability
 Requirements being tied to test cases
 Global configuration management

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT?
The product manager is typically responsible for curating and defining requirements. However, requirements can be generated by any stakeholder, including customers, partners, sales, support, management, engineering, operations and product team members. Constant communication is necessary to ensure the engineering team understands changing priorities.
BENEFITS OF DIGITAL REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT
Engineering requirements management software enables you to capture, trace, analyze and manage changes to requirements in a secure, central and accessible location. This strengthens collaboration, increases transparency and traceability, minimizes rework, and expands usability. A digital solution also enhances project agility while making it easier to adhere to standards and maintain regulation compliance.
There are several benefits to using digital requirements management:
Live collaboration: Work in real time, anywhere. Your team members can share information in and between documents, wherever they are located.
REUSE: Use the same requirement in multiple places without having to redefine it. You can create baselines to identify the state of a requirement in real time to reduce the occurrence of user errors.
TRACEABILITY: Maintain a full history of changes in requirements so you can respond quickly to audits. Your team can see what changed, who changed it and when it changed.
CONSISTENCY: Organize relevant information logically and easily in a way your team and stakeholders understand. You can sort requirements by priority, risk, status and category.

BEST PRACTICES FOR REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT
Your products are only as good as the requirements that drive them. For systems engineers to manage the growing complexity of connected products, they need better visibility into changes, deeper insight into data and shared tools for global collaboration.
REQUIREMENTS TRACEABILITY
Link individual artifacts to test cases for full visibility of changes in engineering requirements as they happen. Capture all annotations, maintain them and make them easily accessible.
International trade is the purchase and sale of goods and services by companies in different countries. Consumer goods, raw materials, food, and machinery all are bought and sold in the international marketplace.
VARIANT MANAGEMENT
Digitally manage the entire version and variant process while monitoring the progression of the system through a shared dashboard. Store data in a central location and present it in document format.
Engineering compliance
Incorporate industry standards and regulations into your requirements to achieve compliance early on. Building compliance into the end-to-end engineering lifecycle makes achieving compliance less complex.
AGILE MANAGEMENT
Streamline engineering processes to enable global collaboration and the reality of a single source of truth. Build confidence in the teams doing the work by showing them the value of their efforts in real time.
HOW CAN AI HELP WITH REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT?
Through the use of AI, engineering teams can more easily flag poorly written, incomplete and ambiguous requirements while receiving real-time coaching on how to improve them. Watson AI scores requirements based on quality indicators and will present suggestions that can make them more clear, consistent and complete. By adding AI to your requirements management strategy, you can strengthen the quality of your requirements while reducing errors and costs.
WHAT IS REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT?
Whether you’re just learning the basics of requirements management, looking to improve your current requirements management process, or interested in benchmarking your process against industry leaders, you’re in the right place.
This article covers what requirements management is, why managing requirements matters, what the requirements management process entails, and how to manage requirements when creating complex, highly regulated products.
WHAT IS A NEED?
A need is an agreed-to expectation for a product or system to perform some function or possess some quality within specified constraints with acceptable risk. Needs communicate what the stakeholders need and expect from a product or system in order for a given problem or opportunity to be addressed.

WHAT IS A REQUIREMENT?
A requirement is the result of a formal transformation of one or more needs or parent requirements into an agreed-to obligation for a product or system to perform some function or possess some quality within specified constraints with acceptable risk.
There are different types of needs and requirements that range from a business focus to a user focus to a technical focus.
Business needs and requirements, sometimes referred to as stakeholder needs and requirements, are those derived from the business processes or elicited from the stakeholders including customers, users, and other stakeholders involved in the project. The stakeholder needs represent what the stakeholders need the product to do to address the problem or opportunity the product is to address; stakeholder requirements are stakeholder-defined product requirements that communicate what the stakeholders require of the product to meet their needs. Stakeholder needs are expressed in natural language without the use of “shall”, while stakeholder requirements are communicated with “shall” to make sure they are treated as binding requirements the product will be verified to meet.
WHAT IS REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT?
Requirements management is the process of gathering, analyzing, verifying, and validating the needs and requirements for the given product or system being developed. Successful requirements management ensures that completed deliverables meet the expectations of the stakeholders.
Requirements can be managed using documents, however, complex systems or products in highly regulated industries mitigate risk by using trusted requirements management tools.
WHY IS REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT IMPORTANT?
Requirements management is important because it empowers everyone to clearly understand stakeholder expectations and confidently deliver a product that has been verified to meet the requirements and validated to meet the needs.
Requirements management is a sophisticated process that includes many moving parts and diverse groups of people. Typically, the product management department, specifically the product manager, is responsible for the requirements management process. They work with the stakeholders, including business teams, customers, users, developers, testers, regulators, and quality assurance.
Additionally, a product may have only 100 requirements, or it may have several thousand. This number will depend on the product’s complexity and level of regulation. With all these elements at play, success hinges on the ability to get everyone on the same page, working toward the same goal.
Therefore, the business value of managing requirements is huge, as successful requirements management is key to project success. Benefits of requirements management include:
• Enhance understanding of stakeholder needs, requirements, and expectations and the problem or opportunity the product means to address
• Gain clarity on scope, budget, and schedule
• Minimize costly, time-consuming rework
• Increase product quality
• Mitigate risk
• Improve likelihood of delivering the right product, within budget and schedule with the required quality.
The importance of requirements management is intensified, however, when building complex or highly regulated products. This is because more time and budget are invested in development. The cost of getting it wrong — be it money, time, or reputation — is too great to risk. Hence, developers in regulated industries, or those who develop products with a lengthy list of needs and requirements, tend to rely on requirements management tools, like Jama Connect® to keep their projects in order.
REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT VS. PROJECT MANAGEMENT
While it may seem that requirements management and project management are synonymous, there is a difference. Simply, project management is getting the product built within budget and schedule with the available resources. Requirements management is making sure the product is the right product and that it is built right.
The goal of the product development process is to create a successful product that meets stakeholder, customer, and market needs. The requirements management piece of product development includes managing the needs and requirements so that the product meets stakeholder expectations. Therefore, needs and requirements along with budget and schedule set the scope for the project.
However, the domain of project management encompasses tasks like providing budget, personnel, and resources needed to develop the product.
STAGES OF THE REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT PROCESS
So, how do you manage requirements? The most successful teams work from a defined requirements management process. Defining the requirements management process is important because requirements change throughout a project. When this happens, that changes needs to pass through the same, repeatable process.
There are four main stages of the requirements management process — planning, development, system verification, and system validation — each with important considerations to the overall project. Change management, while not a stage itself, affects nearly every phase of the requirements management process.
PLANNING STAGE
The product development methodology—waterfall, agile, or Scrum—helps decide how requirements move through the process. Waterfall models are typically linear with development moving from one process area to another with a completed product delivered with the required features and functionality. Agile development, including Scrum, is iterative in nature. In requirements management, agile teams, and those using the Scrum approach, may be working on different sets of requirements concurrently, delivering a product in increments, each increment adding value with additional features or functionality.
No matter which methodology is employed, the Requirements Management Plan (RMP) is the documented process the team uses throughout product development. It contains information like stakeholder roles and responsibilities, which needs and requirement artifacts will be defined, how traceability will be competed and managed, how needs and requirements baseline will be handled, how interactions (interfaces) with external systems and users will be managed, how changes will be managed, how the product will be verified to meet the requirements, and how the product will be validated to meet the needs.
A successful Requirements Management Plan is visible to and has sign off from stakeholders, as it sets the course and expectations for all stakeholders throughout the product development journey.

NEEDS AND REQUIREMENTS ARTIFACTS
Part of the RMP is defining the needs and requirements artifacts that will be created during the requirements management process.
Needs and requirements artifacts include the data and information concerning the needs and requirements and related information. Examples include diagrams, and models, integrated set of needs, set of product requirements, use cases, design documents, testing plans and procedures. Requirements artifacts are used throughout the product development lifecycle to:
• Describe The Product Being Built
• Identify the actions needed to develop the product
• Capture the actions performed during development
• Define the testing needed for system verification and system validation
• Assist with stakeholder review, communications, and engagement
While some organizations will communicate this information in a document form (e.g., a Software Requirements Specification (SRS)), the increasing trend is to manage the needs and requirements within a requirements management software application.
The reason organizations are moving towards a data-centric practice of product development is that is hard, for any document-based approach to be flexible and scalable enough for complex agile projects. This is especially true for highly regulated industries that must prove compliance. Due to numerous factors—lack of consistent updating, human error, incomplete data, version control, the need to establish and maintain traceability, etc.—documents simply cannot be relied upon determine whether a need or requirement is fulfilled.
Agile product teams working on complex products in highly regulated industries will have much more success using a requirements management software application to streamline the requirements analysis phase of requirements definition and management. Modern requirements definition and management solutions, like Jama Connect®, define, establish traceability for, manage, and validate complex product requirements automatically, which simplifies not only requirements analysis, but the overall requirements definition and management process as well.
It is imperative that needs and requirements and their artifacts are linked to each other and to additional related artifacts. This can be difficult to achieve using documents, as the manual nature lends itself to myriad errors. This is especially true in the case of complex or highly-regulated products where traceability is a prerequisite for proving compliance.
NEEDS AND REQUIREMENTS ATTRIBUTES
To keep track of the requirements in a given project, each requirement should have a specific list of attributes. Requirements attributes are used to ensure that requirements are organized and uniquely identified across all requirements artifacts. The attributes also aid in managing the sets of needs and requirements, enabling reporting and dashboards to be defined to provide accurate and timely status of the project.

It is a best practice that the following requirement attributes are included for all needs and requirements:
• Unique Identifier
• Rationale
• Owner
• Type
• Definition status
• Priority
• Criticality
• Compliance
• Version number
• Change history
• Trace data
• Verification status (for requirements)
• Validation status (for needs)

NEEDS AND REQUIREMENTS BASELINE
A needs and requirements baseline is a point-in-time look at a committed set of agreed-upon, reviewed, and approved needs and requirements – or planned functionality and features – to be included in the product. The purpose is to provide information to stakeholders so they can make informed decisions on and possibly modify the planned functionality and features using change requests.
The RMP defines a baseline strategy including timing and frequency of creation, needs and requirements prioritization (deciding which requirements should be included), publishing, change management, requirements verification, and requirements validation. In this context needs and requirements verification address the quality of the needs and requirements statements as well as the existence and correctness of the traceability. Needs validation is confirmation with the stakeholders that the integrated set of needs clearly communicates the intent of the stakeholder in terms of what the need the product to do. Requirements validation is confirmation with the stakeholders that individual requirements and the entire set of requirements clearly communicate the intent of the needs they were transformed from. The quality of the requirements is dependent upon the quality of the needs from which they were transformed.
Establishing a requirements baseline is important because it implies that:
• Scope has been defined and agreed to – (critical to controlling scope creep!)
• Formal change control begins
• Staffing levels and budgets are set
• Schedule commitments are made
Typically, baselines are stored in software requirements specification (SRS) documents. However, a complex system might need a variety of software, hardware, and interface requirement specifications to encapsulate the baseline’s components. This can be cumbersome to maintain during initial development and downright impossible during change management.
Alternatively, working with baselines in a requirements management solution allows baselines to be defined as a subset of the requirements already stored in the database. This streamlines the process – from prioritization through stakeholder sign-off.
REQUIREMENTS DEVELOPMENT STAGE
The development stage is conducted using the organization’s requirements analysis process.
The needs and requirements development stage includes eliciting needs and requirements from the identified stakeholders, properly defining and refining them, and analyzing them to ensure clarity and resolve issues and conflicts. Without successful needs and requirements development, there would very likely be gaps between what stakeholders were expecting and what is ultimately delivered, which could ultimately result in disaster.
ELICITING NEEDS AND REQUIREMENTS
Needs and requirements elicitation – also called needs and requirements gathering – is the act of working with users, customers, and internal business stakeholders to identify stakeholder needs and requirements and get an understanding of the requirements for a product or system.
NEEDS AND REQUIREMENTS DEFINITION
Needs and requirements definition is the time when the gathered needs and requirements are re-written in a clear and traceable way that enables effective communication throughout the product development lifecycle.
There are many do’s and don’ts for writing needs and requirements, but the following are basic characteristics of quality needs and requirements:
• Necessary
• Unambiguous
• Feasible
• Verifiable
• Correct
• Traceable
• Appropriate

Traceability of needs and requirements is very important. At the end of the day, traceability is the only way to know if a need or requirement has been fulfilled by the design and the built product. Bi-directional traceability—the ability to perform both forward and backward traceability, usually made possible via requirements management tools like Jama Connect—allows teams to understand why a specific need or requirement exists and easily analyze the impact of changes.
Furthermore, products in regulated industries must demonstrate traceability to prove compliance with standards and regulations. Therefore, when writing requirements, it’s paramount that each requirement maps to all corresponding artifacts.
Many teams use a requirements traceability matrix (RTM) to track requirements and manage the scope of a requirements change. The RTM is static and maintained manually. The problem is that change is ubiquitous in the product development process. When change happens, teams must manually search the RTM document for all related upstream and downstream needs and requirements, dependent requirements, and verification and validation tests that may be affected by the change.
Scouring through an excel spreadsheet for each change may not be that daunting if there are only one hundred or so needs and requirements. However, if the product has hundreds or thousands of needs and requirements—think complex, regulated products—managing the scope of change becomes a cumbersome and time-draining exercise fraught with risk.
Requirements management tools are designed to streamline the process—even for highly complex, regulated products. Jama Connect, specifically, uses the benefits of living requirements to:
• Easily determine the impact of change
• Automate compliance
• Enable end-to-end process improvement
• Increase productivity
• Reduce product risk
• Increase quality
REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS
Sometimes, there is a gap between what stakeholders say they want and what they actually want. The purpose of requirements analysis is to ensure all business, software, and product requirements accurately represent stakeholder needs and requirements. The goal of requirements analysis is to get a clear understanding of stakeholder needs so the deliverable matches stakeholder expectations.
SYSTEM VERIFICATION STAGE
System verification means determining if the finished product meets the baselined product requirements. This is different than system validation (discussed below), which evaluates whether the product satisfies the stakeholder needs. Both are important, but system verification always comes first.
Planning for this stage starts when the product requirements are being defined. Planning includes determining which system verification events are needed to confirm that product requirements are fulfilled.
To ensure successful system verification, the following attributes should be defined for each product requirement before the requirements are baseline.
• Success criteria (what must be proven to show the requirement was met)
• Method (test, demonstration, inspection, or analysis)
• Strategy (approach to be used, operating environment, test environment, system configuration, etc.)
Defining these attributes sets the expectations for the test and quality assurance work that needs to be done, and reduces the risk of rework down the line.
SYSTEM VALIDATION STAGE
System validation means determining whether the product satisfies its established stakeholder needs. Successful system validation is what leads to acceptance of the product for its intended use by its intended users in the actual operational environment. For highly regulated products, approval for use is dependent upon successful system validation. Final product acceptance by a customer also depends on successful system validation.
Planning for system validation starts when the integrated set of needs are being defined. Planning includes, determining which system validation events are needed to confirm that needs are fulfilled. One approach is to define a set of attributes that address system validation for each need.
To ensure successful system validation, the following attributes should be defined for each need before the needs are baselined.
• Success criteria (what must be proven to show the need was met)
• Method (test, demonstration, inspection, or analysis)
• Strategy (approach to be used, operating environment, test environment, system configuration, etc.)
Defining these attributes sets the expectations for the test and quality assurance work that needs to be done, and reduces the risk of rework down the line.
CHALLENGES WITH REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT
Requirements management has its share of challenges. One such challenge is change management. Because change is so prevalent in the requirements management process, teams need to address how they will manage change at the beginning of the project.
When building products that have thousands of requirements and countless changes, teams can spend hours circulating, editing, and tracking changes in an attempt to maintain traceability and simply keep development on track.
This is especially challenging when maintaining the needs and requirements in document form. Version control issues are one challenge that results from change. Versioning problems can arise on the artifact itself. For example, someone might be giving feedback on SRS version one but there is already an SRS version two with different, additional edits. What’s more, version control can be even more granular within the document as well. For example, requirement one might be on version three, which is linked to test B on version two.
Add to that consolidating feedback from multiple stakeholders via email or meetings, analyzing the impact of change across various versions of requirements artifacts, and communicating the correct changes and statuses to the right people. It’s a nightmare just thinking about how to keep it all straight.
The following are the top five challenges of requirements management:
• Last-minute feedback
• Decision rehashing
• Change tax
• Attention deficit
• Mismatched expectations
It’s easy to recognize that problems are compounded when managing requirements using documents – or legacy systems based on documents – instead of a purpose-built requirements management tool. Most of these challenges, and more, can be overcome by switching from a document-centric to a data-centric approach to requirements management to one that is data-centric.
HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY MANAGE REQUIREMENTS IN COMPLEX PRODUCTS AND HIGHLY REGULATED INDUSTRIES
The challenges above are real and mastering them can have significant impact on development timelines and budget. Developers in regulated industries — like automotive, aerospace, medical device, government, and industrial manufacturing — are further challenged by the need to prove compliance with regulations and standards.
Standards and regulations can be sources of hundreds of requirements with which a product must comply. Often, not all of the requirements in a regulation or standard apply to your specific product. Standards and regulations contain requirements not only for products, but also requirements concerning system verification and system validation (acceptance, certification, and qualification), and requirements. On the organization developing the product, as well. In addition, requirements within standards and regulations are often poorly written and ambiguous.
When identifying drivers and constraints at the beginning of the project, the project team needs to identify all applicable standards and regulations which requirements within those standards and regulations actually apply to their specific product. Then, they must write well-formed product requirements to address the intent of those regulatory requirements, such that the product will result compliant with the applicable standards and regulations.
Regulations are not requirements. Requirements must be written to adequately satisfy the regulatory standards. A keen understanding of applicable standards and regulations is paramount in writing requirements that will lead to a product’s compliance. Once written, a regulatory requirement should be attributed as such in all requirements artifacts. This can be done be assigning a “compliance” attribute. This provides all team members visibility throughout development, which assists with decision making and change analysis.
In addition to expert knowledge of the standards and regulations, the following are needed to maintain product compliance when building a product:
• Collaboration between teams
• Single source of truth for defining, verifying, and validating compliance requirements
• Standard frameworks aligned to standards and regulations
• Traceability across all development activities and resulting artifacts.
• Simplified audit preparation and data exports
Reporting is key when faced with a compliance audit. Teams must know what data is required for the audit and how to easily access it when needed. Often, audit trails are an afterthought in which teams are scrambling to pull together data from several sources. This is a dangerous practice, though, because it can put delivery timelines and launch deadlines at risk. It can even put the launch at risk of failing altogether. Teams that must demonstrate compliance, must eliminate this risk with a detailed, digital audit trail that can be easily exported whenever needed. Establishing and managing traceability is critical to maintaining the audit trail.
Many leaders in regulated industries rely on requirements management tools to reduce the risk of failure to comply with standards and regulations during the product development process. Jama Connect, for example, can track standards and regulations and compliance when building products. These industry leaders leverage Jama Connect to keep them at the forefront of innovation:
• Arteries IP manages complexities of autonomous vehicle development
• Spaceflight brings the high costs of doing business in space down to Earth
• Infineon transitions from a document-centric to data-centric development flow
• 3Shape is changing the shape of dentistry
BENEFITS OF REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT TOOLS
The advantages of RM tools are many. A modern solution can eliminate the risks and inefficiencies of documents and legacy systems. A valuable RM system, like Jama Connect, can bridge engineering silos throughout the development process, including test and risk activities. An effective requirements management tool helps improve the product development process by:
• Ensuring quality and compliance
• Managing risk
• Increasing efficiency and optimizing processes
• Making it easy to understand and respond to change
• Improving traceability
• Streamlining and accelerating reviews
• Enabling real-time collaboration and iteration
• Saving time
• Improving quality
There are many requirements management tools available, but only a few that can help reap all the benefits listed above. When thinking about the most important features in a requirements management system, first think about what’s being built. The industry and complexity level will help inform the features that will be best for your team. This guide to buying a requirements management tool may also help.

From our experience, and what we hear from customers, the most important features of a requirements management system are:
• Live bidirectional traceability
• Real-time collaboration communication
• Efficient and scalable review process
• Simplified test and quality assurance management
• Always-on risk analysis
• Reusable requirements and baseline catalogs
• Standardized validation and functional safety kits
• Comprehensive visibility and compliance reporting
• Fast implementation
• Flexible configuration
• Easy-to-use interface/administration
• Automated integrations
• Quality assessment of requirements and traceability
The good news is that you don’t have to pick and choose. Jama Connect helps navigate complexity and provides end-to-end compliance, risk mitigation, and process improvement with all the features listed above—and more.
See how Jama Connect can streamline complex requirements management.
Given there are multiple stakeholders, there will be multiple sets of stakeholder needs and requirements. It is up to the project team to elicit these needs and requirements, and resolve conflicts, inconsistencies, and other issues. The results will be an integrated set of needs from which the product requirements will be transformed. The resulting product requirements represents what the product must do in order for the needs to be met. Product requirements are sometimes referred to as system requirements, software requirements, or technical requirements.
Requirements Engineering Management refers to the process of effectively capturing, documenting, analyzing, prioritizing, and managing the requirements of a software or system development project. It is a critical phase in the software development lifecycle that aims to ensure that the final product meets the needs and expectations of stakeholders. Effective requirements engineering management helps to prevent scope creep, minimize misunderstandings, and ensure the project’s success.
Key aspects of Requirements Engineering Management include:
1) REQUIREMENT ELICITATION: This involves gathering information from stakeholders, users, and domain experts to understand their needs, goals, and constraints. Various techniques such as interviews, workshops, surveys, and observations can be used to gather these requirements.

2) REQUIREMENT ANALYSIS: Once requirements are gathered, they need to be analyzed for consistency, completeness, and clarity. This phase involves identifying potential conflicts, ambiguities, and gaps in the requirements.
3) REQUIREMENT DOCUMENTATION: Clear and concise documentation of requirements is essential. This includes creating use cases, user stories, functional and non-functional requirements, diagrams, and other artifacts that represent the system’s behavior and constraints.
4) REQUIREMENT PRIORITIZATION: Not all requirements are of equal importance. Prioritization helps in determining which requirements are critical for the success of the project and which can be considered for future iterations. This requires collaboration with stakeholders to understand their preferences and needs.
5) REQUIREMENT TRACEABILITY: This involves establishing relationships between requirements and other project artifacts like design documents, test cases, and code. Traceability ensures that each requirement is properly addressed and implemented in the final product.
6) CHANGE MANAGEMENT: Requirements can change over the course of a project due to evolving stakeholder needs or changing business environments. An effective change management process ensures that changes are properly evaluated, documented, and integrated into the project without causing disruptions.
7) COMMUNICATION: Regular communication with stakeholders is crucial. This ensures that requirements remain aligned with their expectations and provides an opportunity to clarify any ambiguities or concerns.
8) VALIDATION AND VERIFICATION: Requirements should be validated to ensure that they accurately capture stakeholders’ needs and can be achieved within the project’s constraints. Verification involves checking that the implemented system meets the specified requirements.
9) TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGY: Various tools and technologies are available to support requirements engineering management, such as requirement management software, collaboration platforms, and modeling tools.
10) METRICS AND MEASUREMENT: Establishing metrics to track the progress of requirements engineering activities can provide insights into the project’s health and help identify potential issues early on.
11) RISK MANAGEMENT: Identifying and mitigating risks associated with requirements is important. Risks could include incomplete requirements, changes in stakeholder priorities, or misunderstanding of requirements.
Overall, effective Requirements Engineering Management requires a systematic and disciplined approach to ensure that the software or system being developed meets its intended purpose and satisfies the needs of all stakeholders involved