Statistics: (1486 Views) (0 Comments) Print Posted: Friday, January 18, 2008 Categories: Requirements Analysis (BABOK KA)

Many studies have shown that requirements errors are very costly. By one estimate (in an article by Donald Firesmith for the Software Engineering Institute), requirements errors cost US businesses more than $30 billion per year and often result in failed or abandoned projects and damaged careers. The common wisdom is to find and fix requirements errors early in the lifecycle of a project, but that is easier said than done. Furthermore, the actual cost of a requirement error has been hard to quantify in the past. This resulted in a "business-as-usual" approach rather than proactively creating programs to find these errors early.

If you are a business executive, IT manager, project manager, or business analyst, you need a way to calculate the cost of requirements errors. Once you know that cost, you can make controlling faulty requirements an appropriate priority.

You can calculate your cost of a requirement error based on the simple formula presented in this article. The formula is based on extensive practical experience, as well as data from a wide variety of industries and software development environments. 

Author: Tom King & Joe Marasco