Monday, September 08, 2008

4 Strategies Towards Good Requirements

Name: 4 Strategies Towards Good Requirements
Type: Rules
Status: final
Version: 2008-09-08

Gist: Left with the 3 Most Powerful Requirements Principles, what should you do? The following 4 rules can help you adhere to them.

R1: You should get to the point.
- find the priority stakeholders and use their point of view
- don't write requirements that arbitrarily constrain the scope
- seperate strategic requirements from basics, and from solutions or designs
- ask 'why' a couple of times (root-cause analysis)

R2: You should quantify requirements. 'don't be weary, it's less work than you think, once you tried
- every quality requirement can be expressed in numbers (by definition)
- every functional requirement is associated with at least one quality requirement (just ask 'how good?')

R3: You should give your requirements time to evolve, nobody really knows them completely and consistently, now.
- you will find the real requirements by frequent delivery of your product to the stakeholders, e. g. by feedback
- don't get trapped by the idea someone knows all the requirements just because you specify an existing system ' the world kept turning in the meantime, yielding 2-10% requirements creep per month.

R4. You should analyse the value of your requirements and then focus on the ones with best ROI.
- the real requirements are the profitable ones
- it is economic to focus on the top ten (max) requirements

3 comments:

Richard said...

spell-check blogs as they approach publication so that "seperate" becomes "separate" easily, with human review.

>>Escalate-to maintain and use a checklist for any complex task, such as publishing a revised or new document in a blog or wiki.

Richard said...

For each rule, I want to know what to expect in costs, savings, and side effects. Also I'd like to see some examples of what changed by applying the rule.

I suspect that asking why a particular requirement is listed until you get to the underlying business purpose is very powerful and makes radical changes in what gets done.

Rolf said...

Richard, thanks again.
Asking what changed, as to costs, savings, side effects etc. seems to contribute a great deal to the comprehensiveness of rule sets.
I'll add respective sections to the wiki template.