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 […]
I admit it: I’m a process kind of guy. My opinion is that any time we have a relatively complex activity that needs to be performed numerous times and involves multiple people, it’s a good idea to write down the steps in that activity. It’s also a good idea to train people so they know […]
One of the few constants about software development is that change happens. I doubt any project has ever delivered a product that exactly matched its original specifications. Software change isn’t a bad thing. It’s virtually impossible to define all of a product’s requirements up front, and the world changes as development progresses. An effective software […]
In the previous article in this series, I described several conditions in which writing less detailed requirements is appropriate. However, there are several situations in which recording only high-level requirements information increases the project’s risk. When you encounter situations such as the ones described in this article (adapted from my book More about Software Requirements), expect […]
In the first article in this series, I pointed out that there’s no easy answer to the question of how detailed the requirements need to be. Instead, I can present a thought process the business analyst can use to assess the appropriate level of detail for each case. As I describe in this article, which […]
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