Empowering requirements for a product family

Document-based management of requirements can be effective for single-site, narrowly-scoped projects. However, we firmly believe that it is essential to move to a database-centred way of managing requirements if platform-based product development and enterprise-wide requirements management is to be fully supported. This paper introduces an approach to the specification of system families that is database-centred. It outlines the experience of producing a database of requirements for a TV product. The schema was built using RTM (Requirements Management Tool) supplied by Integrated Chipware. It constitutes a practical example of the advantages that can be gained by changing from the conventional document-based requirements management process. It also shows the difficulties that need to be dealt with when mapping from a document-based to a database-centred product specification.