Requirements management is particularly important wherever complex products or systems are designed and developed in a highly collaborative, division-of-labour setting.
The goal is a shared understanding of the system to be developed between contractor and client. At the same time, the resulting documents often serve as the contractual basis for implementation.
This understanding is achieved through methods such as scoping, requirements analysis, specification, modelling and reviews. Quality criteria for good requirements documentation include comprehensibility, clarity, verifiability, consistency, completeness and testability.
Managing requirements means defining and implementing processes: the documentation is kept up to date throughout the project and ultimately serves as the basis for creating test cases.