Requirements management in large software system development

This paper summarizes an approach to software systems requirements management, called "engineering baselines" that has been developed to address those challenges. There are three primacy dimensions of those requirements management challenges as addressed by the engineering baseline approach: 1) machine processing of system text, especially the requirements statements; 2) correlation between requirements and all other system elements, including hardware components, code modules, test cases, user manuals, and design specifications; and 3) change consideration and control. There are three principal features of the engineering baseline approach: structuring statements into separate, autonomous, stand-alone statements called system elements; numbering with a unique system number to each system element, maintaining history of changes; and correlating all system elements using their unique system numbers.