Requirements Management

Technology is essential to modern businesses, and many companies find themselves needing to develop software platforms unique to their workflows. Requirements management is key to software development.

What Is Requirements Management?

Requirements management is a system for understanding a project’s needs in software development. This system involves identifying, documenting, organizing and tracking the requirements for a given project and preparing for any changes that might occur in the process.

Regardless of what your project may be, requirements management is critical for delivering what a client requests. Requirements management plays a significant role in the planning phase, but it should be relevant throughout the course of project delivery.

Steps in a Requirements Management Strategy

There are six main steps in a requirements management strategy.

1. Investigation

In the investigation stage, you want to think about what problems you’re trying to solve, so you can determine your goals. Broad questions you should ask include:

• What problem am I trying to solve?
• What are the requirements to solve this problem?
• How can I solve the problem?

2. Feedback

After the initial investigation, you can develop functional requirements, like data or technical facts. To create these functional requirements, you need to gather feedback from various sources to compile information. You can use various methods for feedback, such as:

• One-on-one interviews
• Prototyping of systems or software
• Surveys
• Focus groups
• Workshops

3. Cost Assessment

Once you’ve gathered feedback and developed functional requirements, you’ll fully understand the problem you need to solve. From here, you can start thinking about the cost requirements for solving the problem.

Your team needs to think about all technical costs for the project, including the latest automation tools and processing power available. The goal of cost assessment is to develop a budget that supports the requirements without overextending your resources. If you go over budget, consider your priorities in problem-solving and the areas that don’t need the most modern tools or solutions.

4. Analyzing and Designing

The analyzing and designing stage is about breaking down your requirements to determine what each one represents in terms of the project. This process helps you understand how each requirement contributes to your goal and how you can integrate it into the problem-solving process. This stage is particularly useful for refining requirements that are more vague or broad.

After analysis, you can design how you intend to meet each requirement.

5. Construction and Testing

During construction, you’ll need to be mindful of the budget as you implement your design. Testing your software application as it’s built will help you make meaningful design changes based on results.

Once construction is complete, testing will help you understand if the software functions and addresses every requirement. Taking the time to test early in development will save time later, since what you learn can be applicable later if your software encounters any problems.

6. Delivery

Even after product delivery, requirements management will continue. You can apply your requirements to new projects, and you’ll address existing requirements if a change is needed. Requirements management is critical for a successful software platform and business.

Turn to MicroHealth for Requirements Management

At MicroHealth, our experienced team can strengthen your requirements management strategy for a more effective software development process. Get in touch with our team to learn how we empower your business with software tools.