Is software requirements a corporate asset?

The most common cause of not getting the requirements right, is the existence of a cultural gap between developers and customer. These differences result in poor or inhibited communication between the stakeholders during the requirements gathering process, leading to an incomplete or poorly defined statement of user requirements. Systems subsequently developed using such an SRS is unlikely to meet the user´s needs and in all likelihood be abandoned or need to be substantially reworked. We have developed a formal model of requirements management under the evolutionary life cycle approach and shown how requirements development and management can be integrated with a release-planning approach which is an innovative way to capture, control and evolve the user requirements. This approach can be considered as an information asset for the corporation.