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 question was posed by Tom Cagley on Twitter.  At first blush these may seem at odds or exclusionary, but perhaps not.  I know why it may seem difficult to be innovative while we are hyper-focused on continuous improvement activities.  A company that focuses on continuous improvement that tends to be incremental can occlude […]

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 […]

I have never worked on a project that took that approach.  In my embedded product development experience, the requirements grow as the product iterations are delivered, evaluated and tested.  The results of those evaluations and tests will impact the requirements.  There will be additions, subtractions, and alterations of the requirements.  We will update the requirements documents, […]

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 […]

We have written much on product requirements on the blog.  Requirements are those statements, derived from the project scope, upon which we will build the product.  A clear understanding of these and the circumstances surrounding the use of the product will improve our chances of achieving the desired development objective. Nonfunctional Requirements One of the […]

You do not have to go it alone when it comes to developing requirements. There are many templates and well-defined approaches to help in this regard.  If you are developing a complex system, it is good to break the requirements up, starting at the highest level of abstraction.  We will call that systems specification.  The […]

In keeping with our requirements work, we will start by identifying the attributes of a good requirement.  We start our project off with the requirements, so it stands to reason if we start off poorly or in the wrong direction, we will not make the objective.  This situation will get worse the longer we spend […]