Are your Requirements Good Enough?

Introduction

Whether you’re developing software, launching a new product, or executing any project, the quality of your requirements is a key factor that allows the development to proceed at a reasonable risk. However, how to judge whether the requirements are good enough?

There is no recipe for a perfect requirement. Common challenges that compromise the quality of a requirement are ambiguity, incompleteness, inconsistency, and volatility. In certain cases, stakeholder expectations may even seem to counter each other. Nevertheless, the show must go on & at times, the team still needs to proceed with the development based on the “half-cooked” requirements. As the keeper of the requirements, the objective of the Business Analyst or Product Owner is to overcome the aforementioned challenges & provide enough clarity & direction to proceed with the development phase. It also comes down to the project’s capacity for risk – the danger of having to do significant unplanned rework due to requirements inadequacies should be minimized by devoting enough time and effort to requirements creation.

Regretfully, there is no green light indicator signifying that all your prerequisites are met. From my experience as a Business Analyst, one of the biggest challenges has been to determine whether all the relevant requirements have been correctly elicited & presented. So, as a Business Analyst, how do we determine whether our requirements are “good enough” to serve as a strong foundation? Development Team(Developers, Testers, Designers, Architects..) can assist here.

Levels of Specification

Both the amount and quality of the information offered can define a “good enough” requirement. A complete set of badly written, erroneous requirements is useless, while a minimal set of flawlessly written requirements could be devoid of information that developers and testers may need.

Three aspects of the completeness of the criteria come to mind: the kinds of information provided, the scope of the knowledge, and the level of detail for each item.

• • Types of information. While the functionality customers need to achieve their goals is the primary focus of project teams, an effective set of requirements goes well beyond that. Additionally, requirements for quality attributes, limitations on design and implementation, business rules, specifications for external interfaces, data sources and kinds, and so on must be understood by developers. It is insufficient to have just a list of functional requirements or user stories.
  • Range of expertise: This dimension includes all of the requirements data that is present in a specification. Does it cover all known user requirements or simply the most important ones? Have all pertinent quality aspects been covered? Does the reader know if this covers the whole range of expectations or if there are any gaps that they will need to fill in? If it’s not complete, will all readers see the same gaps? Requirements that are assumed and implied but are not explicitly stated run the danger of being forgotten.
  • Comprehensiveness of information: The level of precision and detail offered for each demand is the subject of the third dimension. Are potential exceptions (error circumstances) identified and how should the system respond to them specified in the requirements? Do they also simply cover the blissful trajectories of typical behaviour? Does the standard cover uninstalling and reinstalling software, fixing installations that go wrong, and applying updates and patches if it talks about a quality trait like installability? Requirements, both functional and nonfunctional, must be sufficiently detailed in the actual solution to allow for verification.

What Amount Is “Enough”?

Determining whether your requirement is “enough” depends on several factors, including the nature and complexity of the project, the needs and expectations of stakeholders, and the stage of the project lifecycle. While there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, there are certain measures we can take(as Business Analysts) to take a judgment call – invite some developers, testers, architects, and other stakeholders to review the requirements and judge whether the information provided is detailed & clear enough for everyone to do a good job.

Conclusion

It doesn’t matter how excellent a Business Analyst thinks the requirements are, requirements quality is in the eye of the beholder — in this case, the people who will actually need to work on those requirements. So, always seek review & feedback from these internal stakeholders to determine whether your requirements are “good enough”.