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Lessons Learned from Use of a Computer‐based Requirements Management Tool in the Project Configuration Control Board Environment
Author(s) -
Meilich Abe
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
incose international symposium
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2334-5837
DOI - 10.1002/j.2334-5837.1997.tb02167.x
Subject(s) - flexibility (engineering) , vendor , process (computing) , procurement , systems engineering , computer science , control (management) , configuration management (itsm) , software engineering , engineering management , process management , requirements management , requirements engineering , engineering , software , statistics , mathematics , marketing , artificial intelligence , business , operating system , programming language
This paper presents some lessons learned in Requirements Management (RM) utilizing a computer‐based tool in conjunction with a Configuration Management process and with the oversight of a Project Configuration Control Board. Computer‐based RM tools should help facilitate systems engineering on large complex system development projects. But, sometimes, the drive to either develop tools or purchase Commercial Off‐the‐Shelf (COTS) RM tools early in the life of a project is often pursued without a thorough understanding of the process, environment, or culture in which the tools will be used. The individual or group responsible for tool procurement is often not the same as those that will have to manage the tool as part of an overall systems engineering process. Those who are responsible for procuring the tool sometimes are overly attracted to the flexibility and number of features the tool provides (i.e., typical vendor selection criteria checklists), only to find that the flexibility adds more problems and choices than the requirements analyst was prepared for. Under this scenario, the final tool choice features must be severely constrained, to manage and report the requirements and their dependencies to the Project Configuration Control Board. While taken from experience, the specifics of the actual projects used as a model for this paper and the computer‐based tool vendor names have been deliberately removed to better focus on the issues addressed in the paper.