Requirements Management (RM) has been established to ensure seamless specifications along the product creation process. To manage complex specification processes and requirements dependencies companies introduced requirements management systems. The generic „Requirement Interchange Format (RIF)” was created to enable the exchange of information across different requirements management systems.

In summer 2008 the prostep ivip association initiated the project group IntRIF to increase the acceptance and application of RIF by transferring the recommendation into an international standard. With the successful standardization in April 2011 OMG ReqIF 1.0.1 has been published as the official successor of RIF.

Two project groups are currently working on the enhancement of the format and its application. In 2011 the ReqIF Implementor Forum was established for realizing a strong technological basis. In 2016 the community of user representatives then consequently made the next step: Specifying relevant use cases for ReqIF application in industry.

To evaluate the feasibility of requirement data exchange with ReqIF, benchmarks are conducted, the very first in 2018. The benchmarks were well received by the users and implementers, as they provided valuable information for the usage and further development of requirement management tools. In this fourth benchmark, the tested scenario is a customer/supplier data exchange with comments on supplier and updates on customer side. With 6 participating software providers, there were a total of 9 participating RM-systems and connectors that were tested in 72 different tool combinations. The benchmark was run at prostep ivip site with support of the participating software providers. The criteria and test data were defined by the ReqIF Workflow Forum.