A Requirements Package is composed of a hierarchical structure of nodes that can be represented in a parent-child relationship. Viewed from a different perspective, a Requirements Package is based on a taxonomy, which represents kinds of things in a hierarchical structure related by subtype-supertype relationships, also called parent-child relationships. A node is an addressable element in the Requirements Package navigation tree belonging to one of two types:

Requirement Category: A requirement category is the subject matter of all requirements assigned to it. It contains a description of the category that you can import into your Evaluation Specification via cut & paste.

Requirement: A requirement is a singular documented need of what a particular product, service or methodology should be or do.

Requirement categories are hierarchically organized. For example, there is a category named "Interface", which is subdivided into categories "Application Programming Interface" and "User Interface". There can be multiple hierarchy levels.

Requirements form the leaf nodes. However, there may be requirement categories without one or more requirements assigned to it. This should be considered temporary, since a Requirements Package is continually being worked on and improved.

Now you may want to know how you can find a particular requirement in a Requirements Package that contains hundreds or even thousands of nodes.

In a subtype-supertype (or parent-child) relationship the subtype kind of thing has by definition the same constraints as the supertype kind of thing plus one or more additional constraints. For example, user interface is a subtype of interface. So, any user interface is also an interface, but not every interface is a user interface. So, a thing needs to satisfy more constraints to be a user interface than to be an interface.

When you are looking for a particular requirement, the best approach is to do a little "mental classification", which is quite natural, since the human mind naturally organizes its knowledge of the world into classification schemes. For example, if you were looking for "JDBC" (Java Database Connectivity), you would know that it is a database access interface. Thus you would work your way down from the "Interface" requirement category node.

Alternatively, you can always use the search function in the Requirements Package Browser. For example, when you search for a requirement category that contains the character string "jdbc", the first requirements category that contains the search string is selected.