Setting up a Requirements Tool

Your Requirements Management Tool setup is the foundation of your requirements management program. How you set it up in the beginning will be with you for the life of the tool. Some things will change over time and you can make changes in process but the core set up is there to the end. You can make a 180 degree change but it is difficult and time consuming.

1.Plan for the long run
What I mean by this is that some requirements projects last for years. I currently work on a requirements data set that has over 15 years worth of history. This project has a lot of reuse of requirements and has multiple customers and variants of the product. This type of data set requires a different setup that a data set for a project that is a one time effort and will be done in two years. The requirements structure in the tool is very different for the long term project than a short term project.
2.Determine your Metrics
This has a huge impact on what attributes you need to employ. I once took over a requirements management tool that had some requirements sets that had over 120 attributes. Attributes where added as they would come up with a new metric. Lots of users had the ability to add new attributes to the data set and what this did was create a data set that was inconsistent. Attributes would be used for a short time and then abandoned or only used by certain users. So the data was not useable. Be careful of attribute creep it can be as bad as requirements creep. Its good to work attribute management into your requirements management plan.
3.Plan for Reuse
On long term projects where you will be creating different variants of a product for multiple customers or uses plan on how you will reuse or share the baseline set of requirements. This is critical when a baseline requirement changes that effects all of your variants. This is also called impact analysis and is difficult to do if you have separate data sets for all of your variants.
4.Process vs Tool
This is one of my favorite subjects and is almost as bad as talking politics or religion at the bar. I have been quoted as saying “I can manage any requirements program with a box of crayons as long as I have a good process”. I stick by that statement and have seen it in real projects where a individual was managing a complex set of requirements on a spreadsheet to such a level of completeness that I asked him to speak at one of my consulting projects. I was at a company that had bought what was suppose to be the Best Requirements Tool on the market and their requirements program was bringing them to a complete stop. As I looked into how they where using the “Best Requirements Tool” I started where I always start, their requirements management plan. They didn’t have one and this was the problem. The tool was quite capable of handling the project they where working on it just had no direction. Tools and I mean any tool is there to support your process and help you do the job.

Look for more specific tips on this in the REQID forum