REQM and PA Categories
I find REQM to be rather mixed in relation to the PA categories. In the DEV model it's been placed in Engineering. In ACQ and SVC it's in Project Management. I would guess (and that's all it is) that V 1.3 probably will place it in the latter category for all three models, as that would provide more consistency in the CMF.
I've long felt that one could argue for REQM's assignment to Project Management, Engineering, or Support because of the diversity among its SP's:
- SP 1.1 (Develop an understanding with the requirements providers on the meaning of the requirements.) seems to be closely related to--and might even be included in--RD. This SP argues for the Engineering placement.
- SP 1.2 (Obtain commitment to the requirements from the project participants.) seems to lean more toward Project Management.
- SP 1.3 (Manage changes to the requirements as they evolve during the project.) clearly ties to CM, particularly to SG 2.
- SP 1.4 (Maintain bidirectional traceability among the requirements and work products.) has an obvious Engineering flavor to it, but it also smacks of the same sort of administrative work that's provided by the ML 2 Support PAs.
- SP 1.5 (Identify inconsistencies between the project plans and work products and the requirements.) leans pretty clearly in the Project Management direction for me, as with SP 1.2.
All the practices relate to requirements in some way, so for me it makes sense to put them in close proximity within a single PA. The criticality of requirements as the root cause of many ML 1 problems further argues for some explicit, special attention.
REQM interacts significantly with many of the Project Management, Engineering, and Support PAs. Addressing all of those interactions would require far too much time and space for discussion here, but they constitute one of the model threads that's well worth taking the time to investigate further on one's own.
Awareness of REQM's interaction with the work described by so many PAs can be of great help when implementing CMMI-based process improvement.