CURRENT TRENDS IN REQUIREMENTS AND SPECIFICATION MANAGEMENT

Abstract

ABSTRACTOver the last 5 years, Marconi Systems Technology has been involved in developing a state‐of‐the‐art software product for requirements elicitation, traceability and management, able to interface with other best‐of‐breed CASE (Computer Aided Systems Engineering) tools. The product, known as “RTM” (Requirements & Traceability Management) (MST 1996), has achieved critical worldwide acclaim and is currently in use on some of the most advanced systems under development.Through direct contact with many projects, it became clear that the different interest groups present in a company or project (from marketing to project management and systems engineers) had radically different expectations both on how they wanted to use such requirements management support and also what capabilities they as specific interest groups wanted from a requirements management tool.Two common themes appeared to be shared by these interest groups. The first was the need to move away from the realm of primitive ASCII based requirement representations into the much more powerful and comfortable review and editing environments provided by many of today's leading desktop publishing tools. The second was to have the powerful information modeling, traceability, audit trail and impact analysis capabilities of RTM “fused” into their preferred editing environments.This paper describes some of these current trends in requirements & specification management and their implementation in RTM V3.