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Requirements Management

Every project seeks to satisfy needs expressed by groups of people, its stakeholders. The process to capture and precisely express stakeholders' needs produces set(s) of information, such as:

  • Needs, goals and objectives (NGOs)
  • User stories
  • User requirements
  • Concept of Operations (CONOPS)

This information specifies what is needed and not how the needs are to be met. The process will next produce design constraints, that express how these needs will be met, as further set(s) of information, such as:

  • System requirements
  • Use cases
  • Analysis or logical models

To be useful, this information must be assembled, categorised, analysed and refined to allow later phases to occur. This is requirements engineering, which applies quality controls to the information sets, including clarity, uniqueness, atomicity, measurability and testability.

In agile processes, these activities occur throughout the project in each iteration. In other processes, the activities occur in an early phase, and are continually reviewed. In all cases, stakeholders' needs are rarely static.

Requirements management is everything needed to engineer information as needs change. It means to track changes, ensure traceability to the sources and uses of the information, and provide reviews that record approval of the information being produced.

To be truly effective, requirements management is not an end in itself. Requirements are not the products and services that meet stakeholders' needs, they are simply an important step on the road to these products and services.

With Cradle's unique ability to support the entire systems process in one tool and one database, you can ensure that the results of your requirements management will be successfully designed, implemented, tested and commissioned. By providing a fully traced, tracked and configuration managed environment, Cradle ensures that your project will respond accurately and efficiently to any number of changes in both agile and phase-based processes.

The benefits of Cradle for requirements management are:

  • You are able to manage all your data, no matter how large or small, no matter how static or dynamic, of any format and content, in every agile or phase based process
  • You and your team can work efficiently, collaboratively, even across multiple locations
  • Requirements are not isolated, they are available to every part of your process
  • You can be alerted to, and track, every action and every change
  • You have full traceability across the entire lifecycle, including unique transitive views
  • You can apply the appropriate level of configuration management and change controls and produce change logs, audit trails
  • You can guarantee the quality and completeness of your requirements and other information, your documentation, your traceability and your historical records

Cradle Provides Everything...

Cradle provides everything needed for requirements engineering and requirements management with a unique range of features, including:

  • Define any number of information types
  • Create any number of items of each of these types
  • Allow each item to contain any number of attributes, each attribute storing or linking to up to 1 TByte of any type of data
  • Allow items to be linked 1:1, 1:many, many:many with no restrictions
  • Provide indirect, transitive, linking across the entire lifecycle, see anywhere to anywhere relationships where Cradle transparently follows chains of multiple links for you
Cradle Provides Everything

Cradle Can Also ...

Collectively, these provide the most powerful, flexible and extensible requirements management solution available. But since Cradle can integrate your entire process in one tool, you are not limited to managing requirements in isolation. You can also:

  • Link functional requirements to functional descriptions, including models using any of a variety of notations, including eFFBD, IDEF, UML, ADARTS, SASD, SysML and others
  • Link non-functional requirements to system descriptions, either architecture models, SBS, PBS or sets of functions and components
  • Allocate functional elements into the architecture
  • Manage all levels of validation and verification, including test specifications, test cases, test results and acceptance criteria
  • Perform traceability and coverage analyses from every part of each source and reference document, through the products of requirements engineering into architecture and design models and from there into test management and acceptance testing