Succeeding with Use Cases: Working Smart to Deliver Quality

Requirements management tools are to use cases what defect tracking tools are to defects. They provide an environment for, and database approach to, managing large numbers of use cases related in potentially complex ways (traceability), over time, across projects, through staff changes and company reorganizations. They are a corporate memory for requirements.

In a project setting, a requirements management tool is used in a number of contexts:

• Planning the scope of a release or a series of releases (key in iterative, incremental projects)

• Managing plan execution: who is responsible for what, when

• Tracking project status

• Change control of scope, particularly in evaluating the impact of proposed changes (this is where traceability of requirements is critical)

For a large company, dealing with thousands of use cases (in support of, for example, enterprise-wide project portfolio management; see Chapter 8, "Leveraging Your Investment in Use Case CM in Project Portfolio Management") moving to a database approach to requirements management allows a metrics-based style of managing use cases that is simply not practical with paper document-oriented approaches.