Knowledge Area: Project Scope Management 

The requirements are collected in consultation with various STAKEHOLDERS. Once the requirements are agreed, the project team will have to develop the end product/solution and make sure that all the requirements are fulfilled and nothing is missed.

When the project team is finally ready with the product and will be seeking final acceptance from stakeholders, it is often observed that few requirements may be missing. Having missing requirements at this stage will become a serious issue. The missing requirement will have to be immediately addressed and completed. It may require huge amount of rework in some cases and lot of unnecessary embarrassment for the team.

A requirement traceability matrix is USED to address this phenomenon of missing requirements. Mostly requirements may be missing because of HUMAN error and oversight. A well designed traceability matrix will track each requirement in EVERY phase of development. And will ensure a phase cannot be CLOSED unless all the requirements initially collected have been successfully taken care of in the phase. This way, the team will track every requirement before closing each phase. This enables the team to ensure that no requirement misses the attention of the team and goes unnoticed to the next phases.

This is a very simple mechanism, but a powerful and effective mechanism to ensure that every requirement gathered initially gets delivered finally without any miss during the development phase.