Requirements & Requirements Management

Gartner Reports on the Best Requirements Management Tools for Business

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And calculates the costs and losses caused by inferior RM

“Forty to fifty percent.” That’s the percentage of companies that manage the creation, iteration, testing and launch of new products with MS Office, Google Docs and other all-purpose documentation tools, according to research from Gartner’s “Market Guide for Software Requirements Definition and Management Solutions.”

The result? Gartner clients report: Poor requirements definition and management is a major cause of rework and friction between business and IT.

Gartner notes the growing need for Requirements Management (RM) to be applied to continuous processes within IT, business and product delivery organizational areas. New tools and practices have emerged that emphasize collaboration, integrations and definition. These in turn have generated new demand for dedicated RM tools in both hardware and software development. As Gartner notes:

The delivery of effective software solutions begins with the effective capture of the business objectives, desired business outcomes and software requirements. Too often, requirements appear to be the leading source of delivered defects in software.

In choosing a requirements management tools vendor, Gartner advises companies consider, among other factors:

  • The ability to work in shared versus collaborative environments
  • Integration to other ADLM tools (Agile, test management)
  • Support for your chosen development practice (Waterfall versus Agile)
  • Who will be involved in actively creating, reviewing, approving and consuming requirements?
  • Regulatory and reporting needs for compliance
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