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An Overview of the Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF
By Alwyn Smit (PPI Principal Consultant and Course Presenter)
Copyright © Project Performance Interntional All rights reserved. Authored for PPI SyEN.
The automotive industry introduced requirements management around 1999. Not surprisingly, with this established discipline in place, manufacturers and suppliers strive for collaborative requirements management where requirements management does not stop at company boundaries. However, two companies in the manufacturing industry can rarely work on the same requirements repository for technical and organizational reasons, and sometimes do not work with the same requirements authoring tools. Therefore, a generic, non-proprietary format for requirements information was needed to satisfy the urgent industry need for exchanging requirement information between different companies without losing the advantage of requirements management at the organizations' boundaries.
The Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF) defines such an open, non-proprietary exchange format. Companies can exchange requirement information by transferring XML documents that comply with the ReqIF format. Some of the benefits of using the ReqIF standard are: • The benefits of applying requirements management methods across company boundaries improve the collaboration between partner companies. • The partner companies do not have to use the same requirements authoring tool, and suppliers do not need to have multiple requirements authoring tools to fulfil the needs of their customers with regards to compatibility. • Requirement information can be exchanged within a company, even if different authors use different tools to author requirements. The ReqIF standard essentially defines a standardized format to generate a requirements document with a hierarchical structure that uses formatted text (including references to binary files) to express: uniquely identified requirements together with their associated attributes, established relationships between requirements, groups of relations, and user access control. These also happen to be the underlying features of most requirements authoring tools.
