Do requirements have any residual value?

Squiggles on cocktail napkins are a great way to make a point, or even talk through a solution. But they're hardly reusable, and they aren't a respected communications medium. If you want to avoid reinventing the wheel every time a project threatens to impact a system or business area, there's no substitute for clear, thorough, reusable requirements documentation. And the requirements documents are reusable when the organization takes on similar projects. In fact, that's a good argument for making the requirements documents as clean, organized, and easily retrievable as possible.

Retaining your requirements documents—for example, your software requirements specifications and product requirements specifications—helps guarantee consistent, efficient development processes and design standards for your applications and products.