Manage Requirement Changes

Because requirements are statements of what a system or process must do or provide, they have a great impact on the modeling and development of the system. A new requirement might initiate an extensive program of work, and changes to or removal of that requirement can therefore have a major effect on the model. Issues concerning requirements, and changes to Requirement elements, must both be carefully managed.

The first steps in managing changes to requirements would be to raise specific Issue and Change request items against the Requirement element. You could monitor the appearance of these items using the filtered searches of the Model Views. You might then review the Requirement properties and/or its relationship hierarchies. During model development, you might capture periodic Baselines and use these to review the changes and, if necessary, roll them back to a previous point. You might also use the Auditing facility to monitor changes as they are made, and to ensure that no unauthorized or potentially risky changes are being made in the model.

Facilities

Facility	Detail	See also
Changes and Issues	A change is, very broadly, an item defining an addition or alteration to a requirement. An issue identifies either a failure to meet a requirement, or a risk in meeting the requirement. Changes and issues can arise in development at a number of levels, being raised for problems that apply system-wide down to within a specific element. There are two mechanisms that can be used to identify a change or issue, and the work required to resolve it: Change and Issue (or Defect) elements - structured comments that identify a problem at system-level, although they can also be attached to a specific element from which a problem arises. Both types of element resemble the Requirement element, and can be linked to one or more other elements that have to be reviewed, with relationships such as Association, Dependency and Realize. The two types of element can also form hierarchies or groups, where complex problems arise Maintenance items raised against a specific element, and recorded for that element in a Maintenance window. Maintenance items enable the distinction between Defects (a failure to meet a requirement) and Issues (a risk factor that might affect satisfying the requirement). They also include Tasks, which record work items associated with the element Maintenance items are very specific, but if there is a possibility of an item having a wider impact on other elements or the system in general, you can translate the item into a Change or Issue element, or any other type of element that best identifies the problem and its solution.	Changes Issues (Defects) Maintenance Working on Maintenance Items Create an Element From a Maintenance Item
Model Views	Model Views are very useful for trapping changes and issues in the model, especially on Requirements. You can set up searches to identify the appearance of new Change or Issue elements, or to detect changes in the properties of the Requirement elements themselves.	Model Views
Baselines	A Baseline is a snapshot of a Package or a model branch at a particular point in time, which you determine. You can use the Baseline as a distribution mechanism for changes to the model, but the main use is to enable you to compare the current model with a previous stage, and detect what changes have been made since the Baseline was captured. If you do not want a change to remain in the model, you can roll the affected elements back to the state they had in the Baseline. Therefore, if you maintain your requirements in a specific Package or branch, you can capture Baselines of the Package and ensure that changes conform to your change management process or, if not, can be reversed.	Baselines
Auditing	The Auditing facility enables you to capture any changes made to your model within the selection criteria that you define. You can, for example, configure the Auditing facility to specifically record changes to Requirement elements. As auditing is continuously monitoring, you can detect changes as they are made, and verify that they are acceptable. You can also store the log of changes, and review it later on. Note that you cannot reverse the changes automatically, as you can with Baselines. You might therefore use Auditing to identify changes to investigate more fully and - if necessary - reverse in a Baseline comparison.	Auditing Auditing Settings

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