Requirements Interchange Format

Requirements management has been an integral part of the development process in various industries (especially in the military, aeronautical, or the medical device industry) for years. Other industries have been adopting requirements management recently.
The automotive industry for example introduced requirements management around 1999. As requirements management spread in the automotive industry over the years, more and more car manufacturers and suppliers have been applying requirements management and making use of dedicated requirements authoring tools. Large improvements have been made in these organizations and requirements management has been established as a key discipline in this collaborative engineering environment. Now with this established discipline in place, manufacturers and suppliers strive for collaborative requirements management where requirements management does not stop at company borders.
For technical and organizational reasons, two companies in the manufacturing industry are rarely able to work on the same requirements repository and sometimes do not work with the same requirements authoring tools. A generic, non- proprietary format for requirements information is required to cross the chasm and to satisfy the urgent industry need for exchanging requirement information between different companies without losing the advantage of requirements management at the organizations’ borders.