The Quest for Good Requirements | 9
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While it is desirable for the project team that requirements are eventually "frozen," it is not realistic.
The project team should be prepared to continually manage the requirements scope: scope is
not static, it is dynamic, and the development life cycle must accommodate the dynamic nature of
requirements. Because of that, inherent dynamic, agile methods have become more appealing to
many organizations. Agile methods acknowledge that requirements change and therefore do not
force a formal "signoff" and "freezing" of the requirements. Scope is managed much more flexibly and
informally in agile projects.
Conclusion
In this whitepaper, we summarized the important aspects of gathering, analyzing, documenting,
communicating, and validating requirements. The techniques provided should serve as a foundation
for your own best requirements management practices.
1 Brooks, F., "No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering". IEEE Computer, 20 (4), April 1987, pp. 10 – 19.
2 A mashup is a recombination of available web components to provide powerful new functionality using simple visual editors
and little programming. As examples, see Yahoo pipes and Google mashups.
About the Author:
Dr. Martin Schedlbauer, CBAP, OCUP, consultant and instructor for the Corporate Education Group, is an accomplished business
analysis subject matter expert and has been leading and authoring seminars and workshops in business analysis, software engi-
neering, and project management for over 20 years. Beyond that, he is involved in architecting large-scale distributed software
systems for many of his clients.
