Disciplined software organizations collect a focused set of metrics about each of their projects. These metrics provide insight into the size of the product; the effort, time, and money that the project or individual tasks consumed; the project status; and the product’s quality. Because requirements are an essential project component, you should measure several aspects […]
This article continues the exploration of requirements-related metrics that I began in Part 1, which looked at measuring product size and requirements quality. Requirements Status Track the status of each requirement over time to monitor overall project status, perhaps defining a requirement attribute to store this information. Status tracking can help you avoid the pervasive […]
Disciplined software organizations collect a focused set of metrics about each of their projects. These metrics provide insight into the size of the product; the effort, time, and money that the project or individual tasks consumed; the project status; and the product’s quality. Because requirements are an essential project component, you should measure several aspects […]
High-performance projects have effective processes for all of the requirements engineering components: elicitation, analysis, specification, validation, and management. To facilitate the performance of these processes, every organization needs a collection of appropriate process assets. A process encompasses the actions you take and the deliverables you produce; process assets help the team members perform those processes […]
You might have noticed that requirements activities on projects sometimes lead to adversarial relationships. Customers don’t always feel that business analysts have their best interests at heart. Product managers get frustrated when customers demand never-ending changes in requirements but don’t want the delivery date to slip. Testers don’t appreciate having to redo their work because […]
Ambiguity is one of the biggest problems I see with requirements specifications written (as they all are) in natural language. There is no end to ways that people can miscommunicate through the written word. The business analyst’s goal is to try to make the meaning of each requirement as precise and clear as possible, aiming […]
One of the most common types of requirements problem is missing information. Either entire requirements could be absent—which are hard to spot, being invisible—or individual requirements are missing information that help make them fully comprehensible. In this article I’ll present some examples of both kinds of problems, along with some recommended solutions. Omissions When requirements […]
Parent and Child Requirements When writing requirements in a hierarchical fashion, the BA records a parent requirement and one or more child requirements. The parent requirement is satisfied by implementing all of its children. Here’s an illustration of a hierarchical requirement with some problems: 3.4 The requester shall enter a charge number for each chemical […]
Writing requirements is hard! There is no simple, formulaic approach to software specification. High-quality requirements begin with proper grammar, accurate spelling, well-constructed sentences, and a logical organization. This series of four articles, adapted from my book More about Software Requirements (Microsoft Press, 2006), presents numerous style guidelines to keep in mind when writing functional requirements. […]
Whether you like it or not, requests to modify the requirements are going to come your way on a software project. To keep the inevitable changes from throwing your project into chaos, someone has to make the decisions about which changes to accept and which to reject. The industry-standard term for these decision makers is […]
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