10 requirements traps to avoid

Question 1

What are the first 5 requirement traps to avoid?

Answer 1

1. Confusion over Requirements
2. Inadequate Customer involvement
3. Vague and Ambigous requirements
4. Unprioritized requirements
5. Building functionality no one uses

Question 2

What are the last 5 requirement traps to avoid?

Answer 2

6. Analysis paralysis
7. Scope Creep
8. Inadequate Change Process
9. Insuffiecient Change impact analysis
10. Inadequate version control

Question 3

What are business requirements?

Answer 3

High-level objectives of the organization or customer requesting the system or product

Question 4

What are user requirements?

Answer 4

They describe the tasks that the users must be able to perform using the new product

Question 5

What are functional requirements?

Answer 5

Requirements that itemize the specific behaviors the software must exhibit

Question 6

What are some examples of quality attributes?

Answer 6

Usability, efficiency, portability and maintainablitiy

Question 7

What is the purpose of the software requirements specification (SRS)?

Answer 7

It serves as a container for both the functional requirements and the nonfuctional requirements.

Question 8

How does confusion over requirements arise?

Answer 8

The term requirements can mean different things to different people.

Question 9

What is the problems with inadequate customer involvement?

Answer 9

• Many projects rely on telepathy as the mechanism for communicating requirements from users to developers
• Users sometimes believe that the developers should already know what users need.
• Users claim to be too busy to spend the time it takes to gather and refine the requirements

Question 10

How can you solve the problem of inadequate customer involvment?

Answer 10

Begin by identifying user classes and make use of product champions to represent specific user classes and provide input on quality attributes and requirement priorities.

Question 11

How can ambiguous and unclear requirements arise?

Answer 11

Ambiguity can arise from unclear language, multible interpritations or implicit assumtions.

Question 12

How can you avoid ambiguous requirements?

Answer 12

Use multiple representations, such as diagrams and prototypes to clarify requirements and review requirements carefully to identify and resolve any ambiguity.

Question 13

Why shouldn’t you declare all requirements equally important?

Answer 13

Declaring all requirements equally important deprives the project manage

Question 14

Why shouldn’t more than 90% of requirements be classified as high priority?

Answer 14

It can lead to mismatched expectations.

Question 15

How can you solve the problem of unprioritized requirements?

Answer 15

By aligning business requirements, allocating requirements to specific builds/releases, and analytically prioritizing requirements based on customer value and estimated cost/technical risk.

Question 16

What is the problem behind building functionality no one uses?

Answer 16

Some proposed funtionality isn’t clearly related to known user tasks or achieving business goals.

Question 17

How to you solve the problem of building functionality no one uses?

Answer 17

By tracing functional requirements back to their origin, deriving functional requirements from use cases and having customers rate the value of each proposed feature.

Question 18

How does analysis paralysis arive?

Answer 18

It is the result when the viewpoint prevails that construction cannot begin until the SRS is complete and perfect.

Question 19

How do you solve the problem of analysis paralysis?

Answer 19

The solution includes developing a set of clearly expressed requirements that permit development to proceed at acceptable risk, selecting an appropriate development lifecycle, and identifying key decision-makers early in the project.

Question 20

How does scope creep arise?

Answer 20

It arises when the product scope was never clearly defined in the first place.

Question 21

What is the problem with scope creep?

Answer 21

If the scope definition is inadequate, new requirements can by proposed, rejected or resurface later, with ongoing debates about whether they belong in the system.

Question 22

What is the solution to scope creep?

Answer 22

While all projects should expect some requirements growth, your plans should include buffers to accommodate such evolution. When a new feature, use case or functional requirement is proposed you should make sure that it is in scope.

Question 23

What helps to answer if something is in scope?

Answer 23

To document the product’s vision and scope and use it as the reference for deciding which proposed functionality to include.

Question 24

What does scope creep often indicate?

Answer 24

That requirements were missed during elicitation or that some user classes were overlooked.

Question 25

What is the problem behind inadequate change process?

Answer 25

That your project doesn’t have a defined process for dealing with requirements changes and because of this, new functionality might become evident only during system or beta testing.

Question 26

How can you solve the problem of inadequate change process?

Answer 26

By defining a practical and realistic change control process for your project and supplement the process with a problem- or issue-tracking tool to collect, track and communicate changes.

Question 27

What is the problem with insufficient change impact analysis?

Answer 27

When devs or PM’s agree to make changes without carefully thinking through the implications, so that the change might turn out to be more complex, take longer time or be more technically or economically infeasible than anticipated.

Question 28

How can you solve the problem of insufficient change impact analysis?

Answer 28

Before accepting a change, systematically analyze the impact of each proposed change. Understand the implications of accepting it, identify all associated tasks and estimate the effort and schedule impact.

Question 29

What is the problem behind inadequate version control?

Answer 29

If accepted changes aren’t incoporanted into the SRS periodically, project participants wont be sure what all is in the requirements baseline at any time and team members being unable to distinguish different versions of the requirements documents.

Question 30

How can you solve the problem of inadequate version control?

Answer 30

Periodically merge approved changes into the SRS and communicate the revised SRS to all who are affected and adopt a versioning scheme for documents that clearly distinguishes drafts from baselined versions.

Question 31

How can you avoid these traps?

Answer 31

By having a robust toolkit of practices for eliciting, analyzing, specifying, verifying, and managing a product’s requirements.

Question 32

What are some recommended practices to help prviding a solid foundation for efficient construction?

Answer 32

• Educating devs, managers, and customers about requirements engineering practices and the application domain
• Establishing a collaborate customer-developer partnership for requirements development and management
• Understanding the different kinds of requirements and classifying customer input into the appropriate categories
• Taking an iterative and incremental approach to requirements development
• Using standard templates for your vision and scope, use case, and SRS documents
• Holding formal and informal reviews of requirements documents
• Writing test cases against requirements
• Prioritizing requirements in some analytical fashion
• Instilling the team and customer discipline to hande requirements changes cosistently and effectively.