Process-Oriented Requirements Management

In the context of the implementation of increasingly complex IT systems a solid high quality and complete requirements analysis is a must. No one will dispute this statement seriously and yet the requirements analysis process and in particular, the process-oriented analysis is an unloved stepchild in many projects. When asked about the reasons, we always encounter the same familiar suspects: no time, no budget, no tools, no trained resources and the frequently asked question on where the benefit of a process-oriented analysis lies for the project. If we trace the various phases of projects, we notice that errors are propagated from the analysis into the design and implementation, leading to costly rework scenarios. To address this problem masterly, the available development tools have now summarily been ordered a round trip, therefore creating a technology to redirect project-artifacts from the development or design phase back to the level of analysis. This is based on the philosophy that software developers will correct analytical errors, which have made it into the implementation, and the results of the correction can then be transported back via reverse engineering, back to the level of analysis. Granted, such concepts may be helpful to a limited extent, but there is no substitute to the realization that the royal road to a successful project leads just yet over a high-quality analysis. This paper describes the key aspects to pay attention to in a process-oriented requirements analysis in order to not having to rely on a supposedly curing round trip.