Requirements Engineering and Management are fundamental engineering activities within the product creation life cycle. Functional and nonfunctional product characteristics are defined in this very early phase and have a tremendous impact on the following engineering tasks. Obscurities and errors within the requirements specification may lead to poor product quality and increased effort during development. The situation becomes more dramatic by having several development partners involved in product creation. The more partners involved, the more important it is to define a strict requirements engineering and management methodology to ensure flawless communication and execution.

Over the last years the HIS (Manufacturer Initiative Software) defined an interchange format for requirements management systems (RIF). The goal is to have an agreed interchange format allowing development partners to exchange requirements specifications regardless of the tools used. Methods that support the exchange of engineering specifications have not been defined so far, nor best practices, or reference work flows. Due to the nature of this initiative, the perspective taken is OEM-oriented. So far, RIF can be regarded as a quasi-standard in the automotive E/E engineering domain.

In order to improve the exchange of requirements specifications between development partners, an interchange format is important, but this has to be enriched by corresponding best practices and reference work flows covering the different phases of product creation and considering the various engineering disciplines.

The ProSTEP iViP Association acknowledged the need to find solutions to so-called Collaborative Requirements Management (CoRM) and sent out invitations to two expert workshops on this subject. This White Paper contains the basic action plans elaborated at these workshops, possible solutions, and steps toward their implementation.