Why use Word for Requirements Documentation?
... you might ask. Usually, I strongly encourage our customers to use suitable tools for managing their requirements. There are plenty of reasons why I recommend using professional tools for requirements management, but an important reason is to ensure requirements traceability. For example, of the six sources of RE project failures
identified by Michelle Boucher, at least three have to do with traceability.
While we do recommend other tools, Word is available in most companies, documents are easy to exchange, the review mode is pretty good and sometimes using other tools is simply not an option for different reasons. Hence, many people do use Word to create requirements documents. My own experience in using Word for authoring a requirements document is that it seems to work well in the beginning, but as soon as already documented requirements begin to change things start to get nasty. Especially if there is not just one requirements document, but several.
