Software Requirements Management Tools And Design

Requirement is the base of initial estimate and initial plan of projects, and also is the base of development and validation of products. All the development activities enclosed it. Whether a project according with requirement is the key to its success. According to CHAOS Reports from 1994 to 1997 by Standish Group, the most important factor leading to failure of the project is related with requirement. Requirement Management, in brief, is used to record and manage requirement and trace the change of requirement, it aims to establish common comprehension about user requirement and form a foundation which is used to estimate, plan, actualize and trace software project activities in all software lifecycle. Requirement management is important in the international quality standards - IS09000 and CMM. In this article, "Requirement management" means all activities in the requirement engineering. It includes requirement development and requirement management commonly, and contains all phases as requirement elicitation, requirement analysis, requirement change and requirement trace, etc.To solve the problems in the process of managing requirement, using requirement management tools is a good solution. In this article, two lifecycle models are introduced simply - RDEM and REPEAT lifecycle model. Based on these two models and discarding their limitation, we bring forward a lifecycle model which centers on baseline. Based on it, we design and actualize a requirement management tool. The operation flow of tool accords with requirement lifecycle, it manages and traces the attributes in the requirement lifecycle. Furthermore, it centers on requirement baseline to manage requirement change, so change can be controlled. It elicits business requirement, user requirement, functional requirement hierarchically, and there is a requirement trace chain in the tool. In the technical area, because requirements are multifarious, besides text, there are many tables and charts. Formanaging these information, the tool uses CLOB fields in Oracle to save them. To deal with the complex relation between requirements and original requirements, design, actualize, test, etc, the tool centers on requirements and treats others as their expanded documents. The ID of these documents is regarded as index in the requirement, and a relation table is used to solve the relation of requirements and other expanded documents, they can trace each other. The design and actualization of tool is described in detail in the Chapter 5 in this article. Furthermore requirement management module is emphasized especially, it includes every phase of the flow of manage which is from requirement elicitation to requirement release, and the whole process of requirement trace. It corresponds to requirement management theory that is described in the article. In the final, the test of tool is introduced simply.