Software Requirements Change Management

What is Requirements Change Management?

As you write your software requirements (or user stories), you need to keep track of how frequently and how much they are changing over time.  This is requirements change management.  Changing requirements (once development has begun) is quite disruptive and can lead to significant rework.  A well run software endeavour will get the requirements mostly right first time.  In order to achieve this, it will be doing all of the following.

• tracks changes to requirements
• challenges changes to requirements
• minimises unnecessary changes to requirements
• audit changes to requirements

Requirements Auditing

Sometimes changes are unavoidable.  But when they do change, it can be very helpful to see when they changed and by whom.  For this ScopeMaster has a built in report that shows every individual change that was made to a requirement, by when and by whom.

The Benefits of Requirements Audit Reports

Sometimes, just the fact that everyone knows that changes are being tracked, encourages behaviour to do better quality work on them from the outset.  This requirements quality discipline is rare in many agile teams.

Change History, Automated

ScopeMaster keeps track of changes to wording,  wize and quality over time.

Requirements changes can be costly and lead to substantial extra cost.  The later in the software development lifecycle that the changes arise, the more costly they are to implement.

A diligent project manager is keeping track of requirements quality, size and volatility.  Thankfully ScopeMaster does all this automatically.  It provides graphs and reports of change history of requirements functional size and requirements quality.  It also maintains a detailed history of every individual change when it was made and by whom.