Statistics: (526 Views) (0 Comments) Posted by: Ellen Gottesdiener on Friday, September 14, 2007 Categories: Requirements Analysis (BABOK KA), Use Cases, Soft Skills, Agile Methods, Analytical and Problem Solving Skills

Just how important is it to fully develop your project’s requirements? After all, nailing down your requirements usually takes only 8% to 15% of your overall project effort. Truth be told, it’s not really something you’ll want to spend your resources and energy on—unless, that is, you care at all about the quality of your product, your customers’ level of satisfaction, and the amount of post-implementation repair you’ll have to take care of down the road.

Why is it so important to get requirements right? For one thing, you’re likely to introduce more defects into your software product in the requirements phase than in any other phase—and these defects account for as much as half of the product’s total defects. Defects originating in requirements are harder to remove than defects originating in any other phase. But that’s not all. Fixing them later in the project will cost you more, too—as much as 100 times more after implementation than if you detected and corrected them in the requirements phase. It’s no wonder that rework due to requirements defects can eat up as much as 50% of your overall budget.

One other aspect of low-quality requirements is harder to measure, but just as treacherous. It’s called “scope creep,” and it’s cited as the most vexing problem in software development. Unrestrained by carefully developed requirements and mutual IT-customer or product development agreement, the scope of the project keeps creeping—expanding as the work proceeds.

For all these reasons, project teams are searching for ways to develop requirements that are as free from defects as possible. One way to develop high-quality requirements is based on the use of collaborative workshops along with walkthroughs and QA checklists. As this article will illustrate, that combination of best practices gives you a powerful and efficient way to deliver quality user requirements—and, by extension, quality software products.

Author: Ellen Gottesdiener