The Requirements Management Plan defines the Requirements Attributes to be tracked for each type of requirement
(see Concept: Types of Requirements). The most important attributes are Benefit
(from the stakeholders' perspectives), the Effort to implement, the Risk to the development effort, the Stability
(likelihood to remain unchanged), and Architectural Impact (is it architecturally significant) of each requirement.
The Benefit and Stability are set by the System Analyst, in consultation with the stakeholders. Effort and Risk
are set by the Project Manager, in consultation with the Software Architect. Architectural Impact is set by the
Software Architect.
Unstable requirements with high risk, high effort, or high benefit should be flagged for more analysis. Low
benefit requirements with high effort, risk, or instability should be flagged for potential removal.
Below is an example of a set of features of the RequisitePro tool as found in the Vision
document, together with Requirements Attributes for each feature. Benefit refers to
customer opinion, and effort is input from the developers.
Features
|
Benefit
|
Effort
|
Risk
|
Architecture
Impact
|
Stability
|
FEATURE1: Save and restore sort and filter criteria
|
Med High
|
Low
|
Low
|
Low
|
High
|
FEATURE2: Ability to save a RequisitePro document as a Microsoft® Word® document.
|
Med High
|
Low
|
Low
|
Low
|
High
|
FEATURE3: Ability to see deleted requirements in a view window.
|
Medium
|
Med High
|
Medium
|
Low
|
Medium
|
FEATURE4: Support for Currency datatype attributes.
|
Medium
|
Medium
|
Med Low
|
Low
|
Medium
|
FEATURE5: Support the "All" document type (provides an easy way to define common attributes across
multiple document types).
|
Med High
|
Medium
|
Medium
|
Low
|
Med High
|
FEATURE6: Ability to select requirement in a view and GoTo in Word document.
|
Med High
|
Medium
|
Medium
|
Low
|
Med High
|
FEATURE7: Display a requirement's attribute in the text of the requirement's document.
|
Medium
|
Medium
|
Medium
|
Low
|
Med High
|
FEATURE8: New project wizard
|
Med High
|
High
|
Med High
|
High
|
Medium
|
FEATURE9: Fast creation of a requirement (avoid the requirement dialog on creation).
|
Med High
|
Med Low
|
Med Low
|
Low
|
High
|
FEATURE10: AutoSave of a project (project archive).
|
Medium
|
Med Low
|
Medium
|
Low
|
Medium
|
FEATURE11: Change one or more attributes for a selected set of requirements.
|
Medium
|
Med High
|
Medium
|
Low
|
Medium
|
FEATURE12: Ability to clone a project's structure to allow users to easily create new projects from old
projects.
|
High
|
Medium
|
Medium
|
Low
|
Low
|
FEATURE13: Performance enhancements for printing, requirement identification.
|
Med Low
|
Med High
|
Medium
|
Low
|
Med High
|
FEATURE14: Microsoft® Windows95® Port.
|
High
|
Medium
|
High
|
High
|
High
|
Say that based on what you know about resources, you have determined that only two-thirds of these features can be
included in a first iteration. You need to stabilize the architecture, so features 8 and 14 must be implemented early.
However, feature 8 has only Medium stability - so you need to work with the stakeholders to reduce this to Low as soon
as possible.
Feature 13 is only Med Low benefit, but has Med High effort, so this may be flagged for potential removal.
You also know that it is critical that you can deliver something at your deadline, so you want to avoid high effort
features, especially if combined with instability. Thus you may decide to exclude features 3, 11, and 12.
|