Requirements Life Cycle Management
Purpose
The life cycle domain keeps requirements coherent from birth to retirement. It covers trace requirements (linking needs, requirements, designs, and tests), maintain requirements (attributes, baselines, reuse), prioritize requirements, assess requirements changes, and approve requirements.
Concepts to understand
Traceability comes in two directions: backward to the business need and forward to design and test. It supports impact analysis and coverage checks. Maintenance means keeping attributes current - source, owner, status, priority, complexity, and rationale - and managing baselines so change is visible. Prioritization techniques include ranking, grouping (MoSCoW-style buckets), time-boxing, and negotiation; priority depends on value, risk, cost, and dependency, and is rarely the analyst's unilateral call. Change assessment means evaluating impact on value, cost, schedule, and other requirements before a decision is made, then routing it through governance. Approval means confirming requirements are complete, correct, and agreed by the right authority.
Traps
A frequent trap is treating traceability as bureaucracy rather than as the mechanism for impact analysis. Another is confusing prioritization with scheduling: high priority does not automatically mean first delivery. A third is assessing a change only for cost while ignoring ripple effects on other requirements and tests. Also watch for approval treated as a formality - approval needs the correct authority, not just any sign-off.
Rule of thumb
No change decision without impact analysis; no impact analysis without traceability.
Worked example
A late request adds a fraud check to payment approval. Trace forward: which designs and test cases are affected? Trace backward: which business need justifies it? Assess: value, effort, dependency on the identity service. Then route to the product owner for a decision, and record the rationale.