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Requirements management is an integral part of any product lifecycle, irrespective of the level of business whether it’s a small and medium sized enterprise or large conglomerate or even individual software developers. Being the foundation of all project management activities, it is necessary for all stakeholders to be committed to follow effective requirement processes that involve eliciting, analyzing, specifying, and validating requirements and managing the same.

With a number of techniques and software tools, it is possible to handle this difficult task of requirement management. Preventing requirement changes helps the process in a long way. But dealing with requirement changes is the core concern of the requirement management process. Every time a change is proposed. It needs to be reviewed, and its likely impact on the entire process evaluated before the changes are approved and implemented. A shared vision, goals and expectations along with collaborative partnerships between the developers and the customers reduces requirement changes.

Technological innovations have led to the development of software tools that can replace the traditional document based approach of listing out the functional and non-functional requirements in a project life cycle. These tools help to manage the requirements and define releases. A single system can accommodate the functional and non-functional requirements, constraints, use cases, user stories and high level processes besides facilitating an automatic access to traceability and compliance information.

Managing requirements through these tools facilitates to:

1. Track requirements and customize the management workflow as per the organizational processes while still being able to reuse the same in new projects.

2. Organize the requirements and actions in hierarchies for a better understanding of the problem and linking the two.

3. Use baselines to record changed versions of requirement specification and evolution

4.Provide for end-to-end traceability and access control with high level of security based on user accounts, roles and groups

5. Ability to work both online and offline and is web based, scalable across to partners, vendors and customers and extendable to be customized and integrated with other third party tools, applications or services.

Acquiring a requirements management tool is similar to acquiring any other software and is part of a development effort. This need to be in compliance with the project needs or company strategies and should be performance driven.

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