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Background of Managing the Requirements
In the past, the standard practice for developing requirements was to assemble a large requirement document that often exceeded several hundred pages or more in length. Stakeholders were given these gigantic documents and asked to have their review comments back within a week. The stakeholders were completely overwhelmed and the comments received were non-existent or incomplete. A few cosmetic changes were made to the documents and the projects went forward with little further participation by users.
Why Word Document Doesn’t Work for Managing Requirements?
Many organizations use Word Document to define requirements, which is not considered a good practice. Following the practice over the years has led to many project failures and risks. Requirements development is both an incremental and iterative process that involves analysis, elicitation, elaboration, development, and refinement. It is essential that the processes are performed in a transparent and collaborative environment.
When selecting and using tools, it is important that the tool supports the underlying process – this includes requirements development and management.
Microsoft Word was designed to produce documents, not to support the data-intensive nature of requirements definition and management. Good requirements are often supported with linked documentation of business rules, visualizations, dependence on other requirements, use cases, and the likes. Further, it is difficult to track the evolution of requirements and their relationships using Word Document.
Good requirements are produced collaboratively; business analysts and developers need to be able to capture, evaluate and review comments on a requirement-by-requirement basis as well as allow key stakeholders to submit innovations and improvements. This is difficult to do using Word Document- as it is focused on creating documents, not on managing individual requirements.
Key Features a Good Requirement Management Tool
- Organize the Requirements as per Organization or Project practice
- Ability to capture deep details of the Requirement
- Priorities of Requirements
- Collaboration among Stakeholders
- Complete Traceability
- Support Integrations
Conclusion
The above stated six features are the keys to choosing a requirement management solution. Considering the future, Kovair strongly suggests to discard Word Document for managing Requirement and adopt Kovair Requirement Management or any number of other such tools in the market and there are many!
