Wayferry requirements are organized using a hierarchical tree structure, with the level of detail increasing as you go deeper into the tree. The screenshot below shows drilling down into 4 levels of financial requirements. (Many requirements drill into 7 levels as well)

The tree contains different types of requirements:

• Root - a requirement that has no parent. These are the top level functional areas of the software.
• Parent - any requirement that has children.
• Child - a requirement that has a parent (a child could be a parent itself, or it could be a leaf).
• Leaf - a requirement that has a parent but no children.

• All requirements under a parent are called descendants. Immediate descendants are called children.
• All requirements above a child are called ancestors. The immediate ancestor is the parent.
• Parent requirements always contain children, and those children could be leaf requirements or other parent requirements.
• A leaf requirement is always a deliverable and specifies WHAT the new software should deliver.
• Parent requirement scores are calculated from their children and are not rated by RFP responders. RFP responders only rate their products against leaf requirements.

Requirements are organized by topic

This is best illustrated with an example. Suppose there is a requirement for a dashboard control tracking how a product is selling. Potentially this requirement could go in one of the three places below:

1. Reports >> Report types >> Dashboards
2. Sales >> Reporting >> Dashboards
3. Sales >> Reporting >> Products

Where will you find it?

Answer: Under #3 Sales >> Reporting >> Products.

Reason: #1 and #2 are organized by functionality, whereas #3 is organized by the topic, namely controls reporting on how well products are selling.