Variation! Though sometimes we may refuse to recognize it, the world is a full of variation, even in the things we think or believe are constant. For example, my wife has been known to say, “you always do…” or “you never do…”, to which I retort, I am human and I am not that repeatable.  […]

Requirements and Benchmarking One of the things we can do to understand and develop our own requirements is to explore other products that are similar to our proposed product or that solve the same or similar customer problem.  Where there are similar needs met, benchmarking is a way for us to understand how other suppliers have […]

There are a number of factors that can influence the approach we take to managing the requirements.  I provide a brief list below (this is not an exhaustive list): the technical sophistication of the product the risk associated with a mistake distribution of the team The more technically complicated the product the more diligent our […]

Scope, Requirements, and Work Breakdown Structure The scope of the work and the requirements provide us with information from which we can build the Work Breakdown Structure or WBS.  In fact, even before we are able to start doing the work to build the expected results of the project, our work breakdown structure should capture […]

The customer can seldom articulate the technical details of the product.  The customer may define the product or need in terms of function and performance, but building the product from these documents will be extremely difficult or perhaps impossible.  We will need some type of document to begin describing in technical terms the product that […]

This blog post originates from Capers Jones LinkedIn comments about toxic requirements.  He posted a comment to a requirements article and brought up bloated requirements and toxic requirements.  I have never heard of the name “toxic requirements” perhaps that is uniquely Capers Jones identifier – I like it.  However, I believe I have experienced toxic […]

Requirements Language As we collect requirements we are going to need to perform some sort of evaluation.  We know the attributes of good requirements, now we will compare those attributes against the documented requirements.  However, we will not stop our evaluation at the type of language. We will extend this evaluation to other areas that […]