Requirements Analysis (BABOK KA)

Many of the characteristics of properly specified requirements have been well known for many years, at least among professional requirements engineers. Yet most requirements specifications seen today in industry still include many poor-quality requirements. Far too many requirements are ambiguous, incomplete, inconsistent, incorrect, infeasible, un...

Maybe it was that southern drawl. Or maybe it was because I got mad. I'm not sure why I still remember this moment so clearly, but I do.  It happened when I was at Spyglass, over ten years ago.  Several of us developers were in a meeting with Steve Stone, then recently-hired as director of the Champaign office.  We were talking abo...

In this column, I summarize the 12 worst of the most common requirements engineering problems I have observed over many years working on and with real projects as a requirements engineer, consultant, trainer, and evaluator. I also list the negative consequences of these problems, and most importantly suggest some industry best practices that can he...

Many managers and others who are not professional requirements engineers tend to greatly over-simplify requirements engineering (RE). Based on their observations that requirements specifications primarily contain narrative English textual statements of individual requirements and that all members of the engineering team are reasonably literate, the...

Customers are never thrilled to find out they can’t get all the features they want in release 1.0 of a new software product (at least, not if they want the features to work). However, if the development team cannot deliver every requirement by the scheduled initial delivery date, the project stakeholders must agree on which subset to implemen...

The path to quality software begins with excellent requirements. Slighting the processes of requirements development and management is a common cause of software project frustration and failure. This article describes ten common traps that software projects can encounter if team members and customers don’t take requirements seriously. I descr...

Beware of the colleague or supplier who spends large amounts of time in meetings discussing the format, sequence, and wording of documents they will deliver and very little time on the actual content. Strategically, substance is what counts. In this issue of Strategic Software Engineering I will point to some common problems when form becomes a hig...

Some days, you wish you had telepathy. You just know that your development staff is holding back in some way, but you don’t know how to get them to communicate. Is the project in trouble, but they’re afraid to tell you? Since your software development staff won’t tell you what they’re really thinking, I asked them to confide in us instead. I pose...