Importance of Requirements management collaboration and Reusability
Within distributed software and systems development project, Requirements Management often plays a critical role in the ultimate success of any project. For an efficient and optimal management of Requirements, a fully functional Requirements Management tools are not just a necessity but are also potential life savers. No sooner than requirements management practice using documents and spreadsheets is used as a practice, than it turns into a liability instead of being a reliable tool. There are two main aspects of requirements management which includes collaboration and reusability. Collaboration is the foundation for working together to share information and to complete tasks. For contemporary software development practices, “Collaboration” among different groups / roles working across various geographic locations has become a necessity. Among the different phases of software development life cycle, the Requirement Management phase demands greater collaboration, owing to the fact that several distributed stakeholders need to be involved in creating, reviewing and approving Requirements.
An optimized requirements tool should provide for Collaborative Knowledge Management Infrastructure for distributed teams. Ideally it should be a single web-based application that can cover all the features necessary for all asynchronous collaboration. Such a tool should allow users to access Requirement Management solution from remote locations and enable collaboration across geographically distributed teams. Such a solution should also offer easy requirements management training and Maintenance. Also upgrades to the software should be seamless to the end-user. Web based software ensures better TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) which is quite low compared to a similar client-server software with a light web interface that offers a comparatively small subset of functionality.
An good requirements management tool should support email notifications to any email addresses, that can be both generated manually on an ad-hoc basis or be automated. For instance, an email enabled mobile phone e.g. Blackberry, iPhone can also be used for interacting with such email notifications for both receiving as well as sending information. Such an added application allows users to collaborate with the rest of the team even when they are traveling or physically apart.
In case of synchronous meetings (meetings held either in-person or using technologies like teleconference or online-meeting) wherein there are multi-threaded discussions (in the context of each collaboration item) there are forums that allows for sharing of comments with a requirements tool that understands requirement collaboration and reusability and offers the same in a structured way. Therefore the enterprise will no longer have to spend on expensive meetings.
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