Requirements Concepts
Confusion over product requirements terminology and concepts is pervasive. Companies are producing MRDs, PRDs, and SRSes without even understanding what "requirement" means. Despite this wasteful and unnecessary requirements document proliferation, companies are neglecting key nonfunctional requirements.
To help educate the product management and development community, I have put together a comprehensive model of concepts relating to requirements. To view or download the conceptual model, click here. (See my post on conceptual models if you have trouble understanding the diagram.)
A sampling of the terms that the conceptual model explicates:
- functional requirement
- nonfunctional requirement
- attribute
- constraint
- metric
- specification
- condition
- user
- stakeholder
- use case
posted by Roger L. Cauvin @ 6:08 PM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
Where in your Requirements Concept would I identify my need/problem to reduce my operating costs and that by investing in a new application, say an ERP, I will achieve a Return on Investment such that my operating costs will be reduced by 30% within 2 years.
Leonard, in the example, it sounds like excessive operating costs are the problem.
If the problem we commit to solving is
"Annual operating costs exceed x."
Then the requirement is
"Use of the product shall result in annual operating costs not to exceed x."
But in all likelihood we wouldn't commit to solving this problem. Instead, we would identify a lower-level set of problems such as:
"The amount of time spent planning resources exceeds x hours per month."
and
"The frequency of non-optimal resource planning decisions exceeds x per month."
Then the functional requirement would be:
"The product shall enable the user to plan resources."
And among the nonfunctional requirements would be:
"For users with profile y and resource profile z, the amount of time spent planning resources shall not exceed x hours per month."
and
"For users with profile y and resource profile z, the frequency of non-optimal resource planning decisions shall not exceed x per month."
You might like to check out the BA BOK at theiiba.org. I would describe your definition as a tailoring of the IIBA definition - which means it is made more useful for the situation you are in.
Jules, thanks for pointing me to the BABoK document. The definition of "requirement" is essentially similar to the IEEE definition. The difference between my definition and the BABoK/IEEE definition is the insertion of the "least stringent" wording.
Without the "least stringent" part, virtually any condition - including detailed design specifications - could be requirements. See here for details.
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