An increasingly competitive marketplace encourages a "rush to develop," which makes it difficult to adjust to changing client requirements.

Today’s embedded and real time systems and software development market is not just increasingly competitive, but project complexity and client expectations have expanded exponentially as well. With the pressure to be first to market, and the cost of time-to-market delays often measurable by hundreds of thousands of dollars, it comes as no surprise that managers are looking for a solution that can help manage the diverse pressures of meeting productivity goals while simultaneously assuring that deliverables meet customer requirements.

While linking development to requirements is an intuitive notion, when put into practice, managing the complexities of changing project requirements can present significant challenges. Ineffective requirements management can lead to poor communication between customers, project managers and developers, creating inconsistencies that remain undiscovered until the final phase of development, which is when the code is most difficult and most expensive to fix. In the "rush to code,"