Requirements Managements from a Life Cycle Perspective : Overview and Research Areas

Requirements Engineering (RE) is nowadays considered to be an activity, that aims at supporting the whole lifecycle of an information system by: eliciting, documenting, validating, and managing the requirements of the system. This thesis aims at providing an overview of the area of Requirements Management (RM) and to identify important and interesting issues or areas where further research is needed. RM includes two major areas; organising requirements and requirements change management. Organising requirements is concerned with structuring the requirements and storing additional relevant information about them e.g. attributes and traceability information. Requirements change management is concerned with dealing with changing requirement in a systematic way i.e. making informed decisions whether to implement a certain change or not, and support the implementation of approved changes. In order to provided a broader view of RM, the literature study were complemented by an interview study of how RM is conducted in practice. This interview study shows that the effort resources spent on RM differs substantially between different organisations. Various reasons for these discrepancies are elaborated in the work, but one of the main reasons are the type of software development that is conducted in the organisation. There is a tendency that organisations that develop software products and continuously releases new versions of there products are more likely to spend resources on RM, compared with organisations that develop customers specific solutions in one shoot projects. The need to reuse requirements and knowledge, as well as the maturity of the RE/RM process, are other factors that affects the resources spent on RM. The RM activities performed in practice are concordant with the activities found in literature. A number of areas where further research is needed were identified: requirements change management, dependencies between requirements, RM tools, and information managemen