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The variation and complexity of requirements documentation makes it a proven challenge. Requirements may be implicit and hard to uncover. It is difficult to know exactly how much and what kind of documentation is needed and how much can be left to the architecture and design documentation, and it is difficult to know how to document requirements considering the variety of people who shall read and use the documentation. Thus, requirements documentation is often incomplete (or non-existent). Without proper requirements documentation, software changes become more difficult — and therefore more error prone (decreased [[software quality]]) and time-consuming (expensive).
kamina bharwa
The need for requirements documentation is typically related to the complexity of the product, the impact of the product, and the [[Service life|life expectancy]] of the software. If the software is very complex or developed by many people (e.g., mobile phone software), requirements can help to better communicate what to achieve. If the software is safety-critical and can have negative impact on human life (e.g., nuclear power systems, medical equipment, mechanical equipment), more formal requirements documentation is often required. If the software is expected to live for only a month or two (e.g., very small mobile phone applications developed specifically for a certain campaign) very little requirements documentation may be needed. If the software is a first release that is later built upon, requirements documentation is very helpful when managing the change of the software and verifying that nothing has been broken in the software when it is modified.
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