Requirements Management/Engineering

Background

Successful systems are those which meet the needs of the users. Understanding these needs is becoming more complex as people use systems to solve increasingly diverse range of problems in constantly changing environments. In many cases, traditional methods for gathering and managing requirements are no longer adequate. Studies by the EU have confirmed that requirements management is one of the most significant problems facing software development organizations.

To improve the quality of requirements management, requires more formal methods for understanding the needs and priorities of the users, and a controlled process for managing these requirements throughout the development cycle.

What are the benefits of formal requirements management/engineering?
The main benefits of applying formal methods to gathering and managing user requirements are:

• Improved quality and completeness of requirements
• Reduced development costs
• More focused development strategy
• Less changes to requirements during development
• Greater predictability
• Improved customer satisfaction
• Less training and maintenance

How do we achieve these benefits?

• The improved quality of requirements is achieved through in-depth contextual analysis of the users, their work and their work environment.
• The reduced development costs is achieved by using formal methods to prioritize, validate and specify the user requirements.
• By using appropriate methods to identify the users needs and priorities we can develop a more focused development strategy that will deliver high quality products on schedule.

How can Insight help you?
We can help you improve the overall quality and effectiveness of your requirements management by:

• Assessing the effectiveness of your current requirements management process
• Providing practical assistance in defining your requirements management process
• Facilitating your team in implementing your new requirement management process
• Providing training and workshops in requirement gathering and management Requirements Capture and Management Workshops
• Requirements Capture - Effective methods for gathering user requirement
• Requirements Prioritization - methods for prioritizing user requirements

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this workshop you will be able to:

• Describe the key elements of an effective requirements management process using the CMM's Requirements Management Key Process Area
• Define/evaluate your own process
• Specify, document and evaluate requirements effectively
• Prioritise requirements
• Establish requirements traceability throughout the lifecycle
• Manage changes to requirements
• Maintain a consistent set of plans and work products throughout the lifecycle
• Operate a continuously improving requirements management process

Topics Covered

Introduction

• Perspectives on requirements
• Who needs requirements?
• Who needs a requirements management process?

Concepts and Elements of a Requirements Management process

• Where do requirements come from?
• When does requirements management take place?
• What should requirements management achieve?
• Requirements baselines
• Agreeing requirements with customer
• Negotiated commitments
• Managing changes to requirements
• Consistency and traceability

Using the CMM to help define and assess a requirements management process

• Terminology
• Key practices to implement the process
• Key practices to institutionalise the process
• Sample process descriptions
• Steps to implement and evaluate a requirements management process

Specifying Individual Requirements

• Using a template to define each requirement
• Tips for writing for writing requirement statements

Documenting Requirements

• Using Requirements Specification Template to document requirements
• Quality criteria for documenting requirements
• Sample Template:
  • Purpose
  • References
  • Reading Guide
  • General description
  • Software function
  • User Characteristics
  • Software constraints
  • Software future perspectives
  • Development Requirements
  • Prerequisites
  • Non-technical requirements
  • e.g. delivery timescales
  • Functional requirements
  • Nonfunctional requirements
  • User Interface requirements
  • External interface requirements
  • Usability requirements
  • Communications interface
  • Appendices

Verifying/Validating Requirements

• Applying Requirements quality measures
• Using checklists to validate requirements
• Conducting Peer reviews/Formal inspections
• Using Requirements test cases
• Using low fidelity prototypes to validate requirements

Analyzing and Prioritizing Requirements

• Structuring requirements using affinity diagrams
• Prioritizing requirements
• Preference matrix
• Ratings
• Resolving conflicts on requirements needs and priorities

Requirements traceability

• Policy
• Techniques

Managing Requirements Changes

• Who can raise a change request?
• Where is the request deposited?
• What information is required?
• Who reviews requirement for scope, clarity and completeness?
• Cost/benefit analysis
• Business/technical impact and risk analysis
• Approving the request (Software Change Control Board)
• Communication and negotiated commitments
• Prioritizing and scheduling the request - updating the project plan and other dependent work products
• Tracking and status

Requirements Metrics

• Process measures
• Requirements measures

Summary and implementation planning

• A number of exercises will be performed during the workshop.

Additional topics

Overview of requirements elicitation methods

• Proactive and Reactive methods
• Interviews, surveys and prototypes