Requirements › What is Requirement Hierarchy

What is Requirement Hierarchy

You can break a requirement into smaller child requirements that suit your business needs. You can create a hierarchy of requirements with parents, children, and grandchildren. You can create an unlimited number of levels in a hierarchy.

For example, Carol Martinez, a business analyst for Forward, Inc., captures a set of high-level business requirements from Marketing regarding a business analytics system. Carol must break the high-level requirements into smaller child requirements that describe the specific features and changes needed in the current system. Carol selects a category of Business Requirement for the high-level requirements, and selects the category of Technical Requirements for the child requirements under each high-level requirement. By selecting different categories for the parent and children, Carol can sort the requirements on the list page by category. She can also print the requirements by category. Carol finds that she needs multiple levels to break down the high-level requirements into basic requirements. She creates children under the appropriate child requirements until she has reached the basic requirement level. The result is a requirement tree with five levels of child requirements. The IT department then assesses whether the requirements can be accomplished using the current system.

Create a Child Requirement

You can break the high-level requirements into smaller child requirements that describe the specific features and changes needed in the current system.

Follow these steps:

1. Click Requirements, and from Detailed Planning, click Requirements.
2. Select the requirement that is to be the parent and click New Child.
3. (Optional) Click Configure to add more fields or change the order of columns in the requirement page.
   • Select the fields and layout.

   Note: You cannot configure some custom attributes including Email, Date/Time, Phone, Encrypt Text, Auto Number, Roll-up Summary, Lookup relations, URL, and Master-detail relationship.

4. Complete the required fields.

   Important! If you configure the optional fields after this step, all the populated details in the fields will be lost. Always configure the optional fields before completing the default fields.

5. Save your changes.

Note: To edit, select Requirement Hierarchy, expand the parent requirement, right-click the child requirement, and click Details. When CA Clarity Agile is integrated with CA Clarity PPM, the data comes from CA Clarity PPM and any manual edits is overwritten. You cannot edit the data.