Latest Requirements Buzz

Requirements Gathering - Define Requirements Accurately
The requirements you capture must be stated in business terms, must be clearly stated, must be concise, and must be feasible. To ensure that requirements are clearly stated, you should have them proof read by someone external to the project (or at least someone not familiar with the requirements you've captured). Any questions raised by your proof reader should trigger a re-write of that requirement. Clean the language up until your proof reader understands the requirement.

The Problem With Defining Information Requirements
As many of you know, I have been active in the Information Technology (IT) industry for a long time now. It's a strange business and, frankly, sometimes I wish I had never gotten involved with it. Nonetheless, there are a lot of problems associated with IT, such as computer performance, capacity planning, security, networking, disaster recovery, but probably the biggest problem is requirements definition. In other words, accurately defining the information needs of the end-user. The industry is actually quite good at designing and writing software, developing data bases, and acquiring hardware...

Engineering Security Requirements
Most requirements engineers are poorly trained to elicit, analyze, and specify security requirements, often confusing them with the architectural security mechanisms that are traditionally used to fulfill them. They thus end up specifying architecture and design constraints rather than true security requirements.

ROI Is Deceptive Without REAL Requirements and Quantified Intangibles
Common presumed best practices for determining Return on Investment (ROI), advocated by almost all apparent authorities, in reality often undermine ROI’s very purposes. ROI is supposed to provide a valid and reliably supportable objective basis for making decisions: the quantified dollar benefits of an approach versus its quantified dollar costs.

Business Requirements Should Drive Technology Investments
A business-driven technology strategy articulates the capabilities required for the success of an organization. To align your business-technology investments with your business strategy, you should focus on the type of value you want to create Decisions on business-technology investments require structured thinking about what the business wants to achieve. This clear understanding of business requirements dictates the business-technology plans and investments needed to execute the company’s business strategy.  

12th Australian Workshop on Requirements Engineering


What Is User Requirements Capture?
A User Requirements Capture is a research exercise that is undertaken early in a project lifecycle to establish and qualify the scope of the project. The aim of the research is to understand the product from a user’s perspective, and to establish users’ common needs and expectations. The user requirements capture is useful for projects that have a lack of focus or to validate the existing project scope. The research provides an independent user perspective when a project has been created purely to fulfil a business need. The requirements capture findings are then used to balance the business g...

The Realities of Surveys within Requirements Gathering
Requirements gathering techniques include the easy to send, but sometimes hard to develop, survey method to obtain data from a wide variety of people located anywhere. Surveys, however, are notorious for many faults such as ambiguity and a lack of response. But surveys can produce a large volume of information for the gathering parties to peruse and collate, so developing good surveys is important for both the respondents who have to understand the questions and for the collators to get useful data.

The Problem With Defining Information Requirements
There are a lot of problems associated with IT, such as computer performance, capacity planning, security, networking, disaster recovery, but probably the biggest problem is requirements definition. In other words, accurately defining the information needs of the end-user.

Creating a Software Requirements Document
 In order to successfully evaluate and select a packaged software application you must first clearly identify the functionality that you are looking for in the product. A Software Requirements Document specifically identifies and documents the overall business purpose for the software and includes a more detailed listing of the functional modules, and the general and technology requirements for the software.