Secure Software Systems

Requirements Documentation and Tracing

An important consideration for requirements is the methods we use for documenting them. Although better than nothing, simply tossing the requirements serially into a simple document does not provide much advantage. Keep in mind that we are going to want to be able to sort, categorize, and otherwise manipulate the requirements. That means using a tool that gives us the flexibility to do so. The tool is known as the requirements repository.

Something as straight forward as using a spreadsheet as the requirements repository can offer a significant advantage over a text document for recording and tracking requirements. We can add columns for marking the different categories, tags, and metadata for the requirements ...