Reflections on Choosing a New Requirements Management Tool
Michael C. Panis · IEEE Software · 2021
Requirements engineering practitioners in industry are well-versed in the challenge of building and maintaining practice integrity while continually monitoring the landscape—our industry peers as well as our researcher colleagues—for new developments. This challenge is often overshadowed by the daunting effort of choosing and maintaining a requirements management (RM) tool. Vendors are always happy to share their wares, and users typically have a raft of requirements—some of which are functional, but others are more qualitative, subjective, and difficult (if not impossible!) to reach agreement on! Michael Panis moves from requirements authoring to creative writing in this issue’s “Requirements” column, sharing a fictionalized account of a tool selection process that highlights many of the factors that must be considered before investing in RM infrastructure.—Sarah Gregory