I need to maintain a meticulous spec that contains a lot of legal requirements.
We have more than 200 products (and rapidly growing, about 5 products a month) which are all very similar but have differences.
Currently, we find ourselves starting the spec with the following words: "product Y is like X but differs with A, B, C, D..", "product Z is like Y but differs with E, F, G.."
Each product will eventually have more than 100 differences (out of thousands of requirements).
Which is a convoluted way for the developers to understand what the final outcome should look like.
We also need to follow about 6 different documents to understand the full spec for a single product, since some of the requirements are better visualized in a table rather than text and we prefer to maintain them in something similar to a spreadsheet.
Could it actually be that the best way to maintain it is the way we do now? And when product X changes to go to Y, Z etc.. and update them accordingly?