Your requirements are dynamic? – Keeping track of requirement changes

Professional requirements management solutions track in the background what’s happening in your project. What changes have been done and what’s remaining unchanged? Given the high granularity – each single Requirement is a database element – all changes are recorded on requirements level. This allows analyzing in detail which changes have been done between two versions of the same requirement. Who has done the changes and when? What exactly has the user changed? Is there any comment about the changes?

Professional requirements management solutions provide a build-in versioning mechanism. Before being able to modify a requirement or one of its attributes users need to “check out” the requirement. Once they’re done with their modifications they “check in” the requirement again. All the changes are recorded and can be visualized later using a “diff” between any two versions of the requirement.

Apart from keeping track of changes to single requirements professional requirement solutions do also allow visualizing the differences between two different baselines. A baseline is a snapshot of a selected set of requirements at a certain point of time defining a reference point for ongoing development.

Last but not least requirements management solutions help keeping your requirements consistent. Whenever you have to change a single requirement, all related requirements get suspect allowing users to easily identify all requirements that might be affected by a change done somewhere else.

By: Andreas Plette