Documenting and Managing Requirements

Requirements are useful throughout the SDLC and into the future. During the execution of a project, your requirements will provide a source for analysis in performing the impact analysis for change requests, design changes, and other typical project experiences. Capturing requirements in an organized way enables you to perform fully informed analysis throughout the project life cycle and beyond, into the application maintenance phase.

When you have an existing application and need to incorporate an enhancement to that application's functionality, your requirements can be re-used to determine every functional area of the application where proposed changes may impact the existing application. Planning for current project and ongoing maintenance deliverables requires the BA to form a plan for organizing the requirements.

Choosing appropriate attributes for your stored requirements will facilitate your analysis downstream during project execution. Attributes, like Source, Status, Functional Area, etc., are pieces of information about your requirements and can be used to filter requirements so that analysis is focused on only relevant information. Is the project complex enough to warrant this effort? To what level? Make decisions concerning how you will organize and manage requirements before the project is in full 'Requirements Gathering' mode.
A document repository for project documentation can be used to ensure that a project team has one source of authority for project artifacts like process models, use cases, key presentations, base-lined requirements, project and work plans, defects and change logs, or other documents used in the project execution. This type of tool enables project team members and business stakeholders to reference source material for requirements on demand, promoting a diversified review of the resulting project work.