Effective Requirements Management

Abstract: In many smaller companies, requirements management is a daunting challenge. Smaller groups mean fewer resources, and many organizations focus their efforts on design, development and testing not on managing requirements. Some small organizations may perceive requirements management as an activity only for large organizations that have complex products and large staffs to support the effort. Poor and uncontrolled requirement engineering processes yield low quality, highly expensive software products. Obviously, customers are highly dissatisfied with such systems. One of the most critical requirement engineering processes that grossly contribute to this misnomer is lack of “effective requirements management” Information Technology Associates (ITA) has had many challenges resulting from some poor and uncontrolled requirements engineering processes. Lack of effective requirements traceability has also had its share in plaguing ITA in software development activities. ITA started small and so it handled its requirements documentation manually as it only dealt with few customer requirements. Time has seen the company expand, and manual handling of customer requirement became difficult. This master thesis therefore aims to investigate: ♦ The state-of-practice, regarding requirements engineering and requirements management within a medium-sized software development company. ♦ How to successfully implement effective requirement management process within the ITA Company. ♦ How to successfully migrate ITA Company into this RE process while ensuring minimum hassles.