More About Software Requirements: Thorny Issues and Practical Advice

Chapter 18. The Line in the Sand

In this chapter:

The Requirements Baseline

When to Baseline

Software developers often want to freeze the requirements following some initial requirements development work and then proceed with design and construction, unencumbered with those pesky changes. This is the classic waterfall paradigm. It doesn’t work well in most situations. It’s far more realistic to define a requirements baseline and then manage changes to that baseline.

Baseline is a term from the domain of configuration management. The IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology defines it as the following (1990):

A specification or product that has been formally reviewed and agreed on, that thereafter serves as the basis for further development, ...