Rethinking Requirements: Why Continuous Requirements Management Is Critical for Product Success

Most teams treat requirements as a one-time task: gather them at the beginning, write them down in a document, and move on to design and development. But in reality, requirements evolve—and if your process doesn’t evolve with them, your product risks becoming unstable, unmaintainable, and misaligned with user needs.

Here’s why requirements management—not just requirements capture—is essential.

1. Requirements Are Living Knowledge, Not Static Checklists

During development, teams often discover better ways to implement a feature:

  • A developer finds a more efficient algorithm
  • A UX designer improves the user flow
  • An architect refactors the system for scalability

These changes modify the original requirement—sometimes subtly, sometimes significantly. If these changes aren’t reflected in the requirements system:

  • Test cases become outdated
  • Maintenance teams lose context
  • Future upgrades risk breaking functionality

Requirements must be updated to reflect reality, not just intention.

2. Testing Is a Mirror of Requirements—And Must Evolve With Them

Every requirement should have corresponding test coverage. But when a requirement changes:

  • The test must change too
  • The rationale behind the change must be documented
  • The impact on other parts of the system must be assessed

Without this, you risk false positives, missed regressions, and fragile systems. Requirements management ensures that testing stays aligned with the product’s true behavior.

3. Everyone Has Insights—Let Them Contribute

Great products aren’t built in silos. Contractors, consultants, testers, and users all encounter edge cases, usability issues, and architectural insights that should feed back into the requirements system.

OpenRose allows:

  • Submission of proposed changes from any stakeholder
  • Review and approval workflows to replace old requirements with new ones
  • Linking findings to existing requirements or creating new ones

This turns your requirements system into a living repository of collective intelligence.

4. Real-World Example: Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS)

A car manufacturer defines a requirement for the TPMS and sends it to the component supplier:

"The TPMS must alert the driver when tire pressure drops below 30 PSI. The system should trigger a dashboard warning within 5 seconds of detecting low pressure."

This requirement is shared with the supplier who designs the sensor and software logic.

What the Supplier Discovers

During testing, the supplier finds that:

  • The 30 PSI threshold causes frequent false alarms in colder climates
  • A 5-second alert window is too short and causes unnecessary warnings during brief pressure fluctuations, such as driving over potholes

The supplier proposes:

  • Lowering the threshold to 28 PSI
  • Extending the alert delay to 10 seconds, with a requirement that pressure remains low for the full duration

These changes improve accuracy and reduce driver annoyance. However, they must be reflected in the car’s master requirements documentation.

Why This Matters

If the manufacturer doesn’t update the original requirement:

  • Future models might revert to the old 30 PSI / 5-second logic
  • Service teams won’t understand why the warning behaves differently
  • Regulatory documentation may be inconsistent
  • Other systems, such as mobile apps or diagnostics tools, may misinterpret the sensor data

By updating the requirement to match the supplier’s validated improvements, the manufacturer ensures consistency, traceability, and better user experience across the entire product lifecycle.

Final Message: Requirements Are a Journey, Not a Destination

If you treat requirements as a static document, you’re flying blind. But if y
ou manage them as a dynamic, collaborative, traceable system, you build products that are:

  • More stable
  • Easier to maintain
  • Aligned with real-world usage
  • Ready for future upgrades

Requirements management isn’t overhead—it’s strategic clarity.

 OpenRose, a free and open-source requirements management application / tool. For more information, visit 

https://github.com/openrose


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