Artifact: Requirements Management Plan

	Describes the requirements artifacts, requirement types, and their respective requirements attributes, specifying the information to be collected and control mechanisms to be used for measuring, reporting, and controlling changes to the product requirements.
Role:	System Analyst
Optionality/Occurrence:	Developed during the Inception phase and is updated at each major milestone.
Templates and Reports:	Template: Requirements Management Plan
Examples:	WC Requirements Management Plan CSPS Requirements Management Plan - Inception Phase
UML Representation:	Not applicable.
More Information:	Concept: Requirements Management Guideline: Requirements Management Plan

Purpose Timing Responsibility Tailoring

Input to Activities:  Compile Software Development Plan Define Assessment and Traceability Needs Detail a Use Case Detail the Software Requirements Develop Requirements Management Plan Launch Development Process Manage Dependencies

Output from Activities:  Develop Requirements Management Plan Manage Dependencies

Purpose

A Requirements Management Plan should be developed to specify the information and control mechanisms that will be collected and used for measuring, reporting, and controlling changes to the product requirements.

The purpose of the Requirements Management Plan is to describe how the project will set up and manage the requirement artifacts, associated requirement types , and their respective requirement attributes. The plan also addresses how traceability will be managed.

Timing

The Requirements Management Plan is developed during the Inception phase and is updated at each major milestone.

Responsibility

The System Analyst is responsible for creating the Requirements Management Plan.

Tailoring

Tailoring should, at a minimum, include defining the traceability items, constraints, and attributes applicable to your project. Other significant traceability concerns include:

• relationship to other plans
• tool considerations

Relationship to Other Plans

The Requirements Management Plan contains information that may be covered to a greater or lesser extent by other plans. The following approaches can be used to handle this potential overlap:

• Reference the content in another plan.
• Provide the overview in another plan and provide greater detail in this plan. References from these other plans to the Requirements Management Plan may be useful. This often works well on large projects with a separate organization that is responsible for managing requirements.
• Tailor the document sections to cover only those areas that are not covered elsewhere.

The following is a mapping of Requirements Management Plan sections to artifacts that may contain complementary information:

Tool Considerations

Rather than document the traceability attributes and their intended values separately, you may choose to enter this information directly into the tool that you use for managing requirements. This would leave only their usage to be documented in the Requirements Management Plan.

Note that the Requirements Management Plan is sometimes used to document more than just the direct requirements management items. For example, users of Rational RequisitePro often use this document to capture other items managed by the tool, such as glossary terms, requirements action items and so forth. However, while RequisitePro can also be used to manage items such as risks and issues, these are treated as separate artifacts in RUP-the management of which is not covered in the Requirements Management Plan.

Rational Unified Process