Just Enough Requirements Management: Where Software Development Meets Marketing

Five. Requirements Change

Regardless of how much effort is expended gathering and analyzing requirements, they will still change [LUT93, DAV04a]. Rather than hating the change, embrace it, control it, and make it work for you. Unfortunately, “much of classical engineering literature is based on ‘the assumption of fixed requirements,’ which leads to the misconception that managers should have unchanging requirements before starting any project” [LAM99].

Here are some of the reasons that requirements will change after they are agreed to and baselined:

• A stakeholder will be reviewing the requirements document, and that will trigger the desire for something new.

• A stakeholder will be thinking about what the system will be like to use, and that ...