Establishing hierarchy

 Conceptual overview

A hierarchical requirement is a requirement that is included within a parent-child relationship with other requirements of the same type. Hierarchical relationships can be used to subdivide a general requirement into more explicit requirements. A child requirement is any requirement that has a parent. Child requirements provide additional detail for their parent requirement. For example, a parent requirement might be "The system shall display customer information." Child requirements might include name, address, date of birth (details that support the parent requirement).

If a parent requirement appears in a document, the child requirements must appear in the same document. The parent requirement and all of its children must be of the same requirement type.

Parent-child requirements imply dependency. Each child requirement can only have one parent, but a requirement can be both a parent and a child. If a parent requirement is changed, the relationships with its children become suspect.

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