Automated requirements management-beware HOW you use tools: anexperience report

摘要

At NASA and across industry, with multiple release projects,requirement storage is a volatile, dynamic process. The skill with whicha project maintains, keeps current, tracks, and traces its set ofrequirements affects every phase of the project's software developmentlife cycle-including maintenance. The ability to effectively managerequirements influences, months and/or years before project completion,how, when, and how expensively completion, will take place. The SoftwareAssurance Technology Center (SATC) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Centeris working to continually evaluate the requirement activities of a multibillion dollar project. This task requires that the SATC evaluate theproject's tools, specifically the requirement database management tool.The objective of the paper is to identify a major failing in the use ofrequirement management tools that causes loss of data, loss of dataintegrity, and loss of tool functionality. It also shows that bringingengineers and database designers together to define tool use ismandatory; and that each discipline's experience and expertise isrequired for successful tool implementation. Using experiences from aNASA project, we demonstrate some potential risks when a requirementmanagement tool is incorrectly used, and how this fatal flaw plants theseeds of requirement management destruction and consequent projectoverruns. This information will benefit any project considering or usingrequirement management tools