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Understanding requirements engineering
By Therese Hansen | December 1, 2008
How do you get requirements right? Do you have to be clairvoyant to do requirements engineering?
At JAOO Aarhus 2008 Chris Rupp talked about exactly that and why it is so hard to get requirements right. She talked about different approaches to reading the customers mind, how you can match the techniques to your project based on the biggest threat in the project and how to ask the right questions to identify defects in a delivered requirements document.
Get the slides here and watch the video:
So requirement engineering is hard – how do you do it? Do you use several of the techniques that Chris mentions or do you do nothing when the initial specification is set? Are there impediments towards doing requirements engineering in your projects?
December 9th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Here is my approach for getting the process of gathering requirements started. It has been proved to work well in a number of smaller projects with high dynamics and unexperienced customers.
Have the customer verbally describe the solution to be built. Write down all (relevant) verbs, nouns and adjectives. Ask w-questions in between to mitigate ambiguities, for example, the customer might start using synonyms for one and the same thing (”What is the difference between a shape and an object on the screen?”). Also, use the w-questions to formalize (”what does fast actually mean in the context of drawing a shape on the screen?”). After this exercise you will end up having an initial view on a) the scope of the solution, b) the domain vocabulary to be used and c) a starting point for creating functional use cases.
Marcelo