In today's webinar, Thorny Issues in Software Requirements, Karl presented some greatly detailed information regarding the challenges related to managing software requirements, and the grey areas that product managers and business analysts have to deal with every day. For a run through and solutions to these thorny issues, you can view the recorded webinar (flash or mp4) or download the slide deck or audio, which has tons of great examples.

Some interesting questions that were asked during the webinar that we didn’t have time to answer:

Q. What are the key differences between a PRD and MRD?

A. There isn’t a universally accepted definition of this, but Karl has some great templates that separate out requirements, use cases and others. Usually an MRD will explain the market demands as needed by the customer/market, and a PRD will explain the product responses to those demands via the functionality it will develop. FeaturePlan actually has out of the box Market Requirement Document templates and Product Requirement Document templates.

Q. Depending on the client, it's sometimes very difficult to get a formal sign-off. Do you have any advice for documenting implied consent? Is it OK to say "if you have not responded by this date, you agree"? What would you suggest?

A. The best sign off of course is when it is explicitly done. But has you mention, it can be very difficult to do that. Karl mentions some great ways to avoid this implicit surprise waiting to happen. Accountability is very important, and visibility (aka reviewing what has been committed) with a larger audience also works well. There’s nothing like stating this information is being presented to the executive team by a certain date to help motivate people.

Q. How do you manage projects that have hardware and software (even non technical products)?

A. The nice thing about requirements management is that it does not have to be only used when development software.  Hardware requirements, even financial products, all have a set of market and customer driven needs, expressed in such as way so that a more technical/financial/medical audience can execute against them. That’s the beauty of good product management, it applies across verticals and industries.

FeaturePlan will be supporting Karl Wiegers templates with our new Document Center. So if you’re looking to avoid duplication, have data that can appear in your SRS (software requirements specification) and be linked to other requirements management documents, many organizations are adopting product management tools like FeaturePlan across their teams.

If you’re interested in seeing them in a live demo, just let us know at http://rymatech.com/en/contact-us.html.