Various technologies and techniques are disclosed that allow project requirements to be associated with underlying code elements. A particular software project is analyzed to generate a list of code elements contained in the particular software project. Input is received from a user of a requirements management application to associate one or more project requirements to one or more of the code elements. The project requirements and an association with the one or more code elements are stored in a data store for later retrieval. These associations are used to determine when changes that potentially affect the project requirement are made to the underlying code elements. A software development application is operable to interact with the data store and provide a notice to a user of the software development application that a change to a particular code element of the software project will impact one or more project requirements.