Requirement tools and methods

Catherine Constantinides

13 years ago

What requirement tools do you prefer?

A critical component of a successful product development process is requirements management. Within this process, generating product requirements from several different sources, such as customer feedback, support issues, and company objectives, can be challenging.

In a recent blog post I expressed that using the right requirement tools in addition to having a well-designed requirements gathering process will have a tremendous impact on your ability to deliver products to market faster.

requirement tools To get a better real-world understanding, I reached out to the product management community on Quora and asked them to share what requirements tools they use to manage this process. You can view the questions and all the detailed responses here. An analysis of the responses clearly indicates that the most popular requirement tools were basic spreadsheets and lists. This means that there is still a heavy emphasis on manual requirements gathering methods.

Let’s face it, managing multiple customer requirements coming from multiple sources, at once is challenging. You need to have the requisite capacity to properly sort through them, determine which will be implemented, analyze requirements and prioritize according to deadlines and timeframes. You will also need an efficient system to keep customers, employees and business partners, in the loop throughout the stages of development. Are spreadsheets and lists really the most effective requirements tools for the job? In a dynamic highly competitive marketplace, manual methods just cannot keep up!

Alternate requirement tools available to product managers

What if product requirement tools were capable of fully managing this process from beginning to end, while giving you the ability to engage with customers, and seamlessly tie your product requirements to overall product development process? Would this dramatically simplify product-related activities?

I welcome your thoughts on this subject. Feel free to leave your comments below or connect with me on Quora.