Introduction

Accomplishing an IT project successfully is not an easy task. There are plenty of objective and subjective reasons why a project might fail. When the project fails, it is no longer important whose fault was it. It counts that lots of efforts, time and money were spent in vain. Both sides are dissatisfied in this case. The situation when the customer is partially guilty of the failure hardly ever happens, but anyway the situation results in the customer loss. This is what the law “the customer is always right” is about. It means that the customer no matter what kind of customer he is has the right to get the result that he has been expecting. So, we should organize the development process in the way leading to the successful project accomplishment.

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Requirements management is a very important part of development process. Requirements management includes a set of measures intended to collect requirements from the customer, development plan, ranging according to the importance degree, time and cost estimation.

Requirements management process is meant to solve the following tasks:

1. Document customer’s requirements.
There is no need to repeat that all the customer’s requirements should be documented. Depending on the project size specification degree may change. The only fact remains that everything should be documented, discussed in details with the customer and confirmed by him.
2. Achieve requirements comprehension before the realization start.
This will allow reducing risks for the customer to receive something different from what he is expecting.

3. Help to define discrepancies between the requirements and results.
The better the requirements are documented the easier are the results to test. This also reduced the risk of the customer to be disappointed with the result.

4. Define the developers’ obligations.Requirements realization is connected with time and money expenses. The process of the requirements management allows controlling these parameters.

5. Set a two-way requirements tracking control.Within the development process these requirements may vary: some requirements will become more detailed, some requirements will be added, some will be excluded. These changes may influence the project deadline and the budget. That is why it is necessary for both sides to have a real image of the current requirements. Only in this case it is possible to accomplish the project successfully.

6. Manage the changes.The requirements change within the development process. We cannot resist this fact; we just have to manage this process effectively.
In this article we are going to describe the way of requirements management with the help of xPlanner (www.xplanner.org), which is to solve all the tasks mentioned above.

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