The way to structured Requirements Management
The Challenge
A large automotive manufacturer designed his own tool to support the handling of his release procedure. A tool which was since then constantly extended and improved.
The new requirements on the tool were up to now taken from various partial projects and managed in different manners, i.e. using Excel or Word. Thereby the problem arose, that requirements of individual partial projects would overlap, were of different quality and additional information was not uniform. Due to this heterogeneity it was at first problematic to unify the requirements, to pick out the ones with higher priority and to extract those requirements that affected several partial projects.
With the target to reach a uniform structure, HOOD received the order to analyse the problems and find an adequate and well elaborated solution for all partial projects.
Meeting the Challenge
Basis for this project were on the one hand different types of documents for the administration of requirements and on the other hand the communication processes among partial projects. HOOD analysed these basic documents together with the client and set up a sample chart (Template) for the Requirements Management tooling used in the company, in this case DOORS, as well as a related workflow with defined roles to ensure uniform administration and structuring of requirements.
This solution has been set up in such a flexible way, that further partial projects can be integrated at any time. Each partial project can take care of the administration of their own requirements, independent of the others, but can also easily transmit those requirements to other partial projects. The advantage here is that requirements and their additional information can be adopted by other partial projects on a 1:1 basis. This implies that there are uniform interfaces. Requirements which can be named and described identically or similarly by several partial projects are administered in their own area and can be returned at any time to the partial projects they originated from. To enable workers to efficiently and quickly use the new solution and to rapidly find their way through the Requirements Management tool, HOOD implemented specially set up and organized trainings for these needs. These steps were of extreme importance for the acceptance of the Requirements Management tool itself, of the template solution implemented by HOOD and the related workflow.
Due to the long term experience of HOOD in handling Requirements Management tools and the methodical consultation, it was possible to give the customer quick and optimal support.
Customer Value
All requirements are administrated in a well structured and uniform manner. Each partial project retains its independence in the processing of its requirements, but now requirements can easily be transferred and transferred requirements may easily be traced back to their origin. Due to the role concept and clearly defined interfaces, responsibilities are precisely recorded.
