Requirements & Requirements Management

Requirements Management 101 & Why Successful Teams Do It

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Too often products fail due to poorly managed requirements. A requirement is a document that defines what you are looking to achieve or create – it identifies what a product needs to do, what it should look like, and explains its functionality and value. Without clearly defining requirements you could produce an incomplete or defective product. It’s imperative that the team be able to access, collaborate, update, and test each requirement through to completion, as requirements naturally change and evolve over time during the development process.

There are four fundamentals that every team member and stakeholder can benefit from understanding:

  1. Planning good requirements: “What the heck are we building?”

A good requirement should be valuable and actionable; it should define a need as well as provide a pathway to a solution. Everyone on the team should understand what it means. Good requirements need to be concise and specific, and should answer the question, “what do we need?” Rather than, “how do we fulfill a need?” Good requirements ensure that all stakeholders understand their part of the plan; if parts are unclear or misinterpreted the final product could be defective or fail.

  1. Collaboration and buy-in: “Is everyone in the loop? Do we have approval on the requirements to move forward?”

Trying to get everyone in agreement can cause decisions to be delayed, or worse, not made at all.  Team collaboration can help in receiving support on decisions and in planning good requirements. Collaborative teams continuously share ideas, typically have better communication and tend to support decisions made because there is a shared sense of commitment and understanding of the goals of the project. It’s when developers, testers or other stakeholders feel “out of the loop” that communication issues arise, people get frustrated and projects get delayed.

  1. Traceability & change management: “Wait, do the developers know that changed?”

Traceability is a way to organize, document and keep track of the life of all your requirements from initial idea through to testing. By tracing requirements, you are able to identify the ripple effect changes have, see if a requirement has been completed and whether it’s being tested properly, provide the visibility needed to anticipate issues and ensure continuous quality, and ensure your entire team stays connected both upstream and downstream.  Managing change is important and prevents “scope creep”, or unplanned changes in development that occur when requirements are not clearly captured, understood and communicated. The benefit of good requirements is a clear understanding of the end product and the scope involved.

  1. Quality assurance: “Hello, did anyone test this thing?”

Concise, specific requirements can help you detect and fix problems early, rather than later when it’s much more expensive to fix. In fact, it can cost up to 100 times more to correct a defect later in the development process after it’s been coded, than it is to correct early on while a requirement. By integrating requirements management into your quality assurance process, you can help your team increase efficiency and eliminate rework.

Requirements management can sound like a complex discipline, but when you boil it down to a simple concept – it’s really about helping teams answer the question, “Does everyone understand what we’re building and why?”  When everyone is collaborating together and has full context and visibility to the discussions, decisions and changes involved with the requirements throughout the product development lifecycle, that’s when success happens consistently and you maintain continuous quality.  Not to mention the process is smoother with less friction and frustration along the way for everyone involved. And, isn’t that something we’d all benefit from?

Learn more about how to write high quality requirements.

 

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