Requirements Management Through SDLC - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 165

5. Project initiation—Once the funds are approved and a budget is sanctioned, in
principle, the project is initiated. The project initiation activities include
a. Identification and allocation of the project manager.
b. Project planning.
c. Setting up the development environment including allocation of worksta-
tions, servers, connectivity and seating facility.
d. Allocation of team members.
e. Project kickoff meeting and handover the project to the project manager.
In the context of requirements management, the pre-project phase concludes
with the project initiation. Establishment of the need for the application software is
accomplished in the pre-project phase.
12.3 RM in Requirements Phase of SDLC
In the requirements phase, primarily, we establish the requirements for the project.
Chapters 2 - 5 of this topic, deal with this topic in detail. Chapter 6 deals with
ensuring quality in the established requirements. In view of the topic being dealt
with, in detail, in the preceding chapters, there is no point in briefly repeating it
here.
A requirements traceability matrix is crated and initiated in this phase apart
from establishing the project requirements in detail. This matrix would be updated
in all the subsequent phases.
12.4 Software Design
The established requirements are the input for the software design phase. But
carrying out design could discover opportunities to provide extra functionality
without too much additional cost or sometimes without any additional financial
burden. Sometimes, we may modify some of the requirements to suit the available
technology. For example, a printed hardcopy report may be replaced by a screen
based enquiry. Another opportunity may be to send an email in token of receipt
instead of a printed and signed receipt. We need to remember that end users are not
exposed to all the facilities available in the computers or the capabilities of the
modern computers. They would not be able to specify in such a way that the
capabilities of the computers and software development platforms are exploited to
their fullest potential. Therefore, during the design phase, we ought to look for
opportunities for improvement in the functionality which is beneficial to the end
users or the organizational management. Another aspect of requirements
management we need to handle in the design phase is the change requests that are
placed by end users or any other stakeholder. We need to implement all the change