There are many traditional tools people use to collect requirements - from simple spreadsheets or documents to expensive enterprise

application life-cycle management (ALM) suites

1. Capture all the requirements and related items in one place – each with their own challenges and limitations. In order to be successful with the collection of requirements, a tool should be more people-centric than document-centric.

Traceability is a key benefit of requirements management. The requirements tool tracks relationships throughout the project to alert the team when changes are made that impact other items. For
example, if someone updates a requirement that has a related use case and test case, an email notifies the team that these two items are affected. In addition, these items are flagged as “suspect” in
2. Connect everything together using traceability the system for review.
The tool enables users to see the impact of a change - before making the change, showing the project artifacts and team members working on those items that may be affected. This is one of the
primary benefits of implementing project traceability.

* Baselines an entire set of artifacts at significant milestones in the project

The tool enables project managers to take complete control over change within their projects, * Captures change to individual artifacts and generates a version history
providing three levels of change management: * Manages the process of change requests of the project lifecycle
3. Control projects by managing change
Once change control is turned on, the tool begins tracking each change made to project artifacts.
Version Tracking & History When a requirement is changed, a new version is created and the team notified.

The tool provides the entire team with access to the requirements and other artifacts - anytime, anywhere.
The 4 C’s of Requirements Management Keeping the team up to date can be an administrative hassle. The tool eliminates the need to send out email after email with the latest requirements document attached. The entire team, regardless
4. Collaborate with the entire team of location gains immediate access to the latest information and receives notification when things change.
When changes are made, the tool captures the change, tracks the version history, and notifies the team. Notification groups keep updates targeted to those who need to know, cutting down on unecessary "email noise".
The tool includes a rich reporting platform that provides the ability to summarize and model data in many ways. Reports can be generated in PDF, RTF (Word), Excel, HTML and other formats.

What is the difference between these two specifications?

1. Security: a team of 10 hackers [profiled elsewhere] per hour attempting to access account holders' credit card information shall be successful no more than an average of once every five years.
2. The system shall require users log in with a user name and password. On the third consecutive unsuccessful log-in attempt using a particular user name, the system will lock the corresponding account.
The first specification is a nonfunctional requirement. The second specification is a functional decomposition of that nonfunctional requirement.
All nonfunctional requirements can be decomposed into functional specifications.
In fact, when an interaction designer defines the particular steps in a use case, he is functionally decomposing both functional and nonfunctional requirements. He is specifying functional steps that will satisfy the requirements.

Requirements and Functional Decomposition Recall the definition of "requirement":

"A requirement specifies the least stringent condition that must hold to solve or avoid a prospect problem (problem that a prospective customer faces)."
Product managers distinguish between functional and nonfunctional requirements.
A functional requirement states what the product must do to solve or avoid a prospect problem. It might state, for example, that an air conditioner should maintain a constant temperature in a room.
Nonetheless, functional requirements do not by themselves fully specify what it takes to solve or avoid a prospect problem. How constant should the temperature be? How easy should it be to set the thermostat? Nonfunctional requirements complete
the picture by supplying the answers to these kinds of questions.
A nonfunctional requirement attaches measurable constraints to a functional requirement. A nonfunctional requirement might specify that the amount of time it takes for a user with a given skill set to set the thermostat will not exceed five seconds. Or it
might might specify that the air conditioner will keep the temperature within one degree of the thermostat setting.

The 4 C’s of Requirements Management.mmap - 4/23/2009 - Mindjet