Quotations by Alan M. Davis

The primary components of requirements management are requirements elicitation, requirements triage and requirements specification.

A critical aspect of all engineering disciplines is the elaboration of multiple approaches, trade-off analyses among them, and the eventual adoption of one. After requirements are agreed upon, you must examine a variety of architectures and algorithms.

The bulleted list of requirements is by far the most cost-effective and beneficial approach. It is simple to create; it is simple to read, regardless of background; and, when stored in a spreadsheet, database, or requirements management tool and augmented with annotations, it has incredible benefits to project management.

Furthermore, it is impossible for a consultant to walk into your office, examine a requirement, and tell you that it is either too detailed or too vague. The correct level of detail is completely dependent on the needs of the customer.

If you do not pay enough attention to requirements, you endanger the project’s success by introducing too much risk. If you pay too much attention to requirements, you overburden the project and raise the likelihood of being late and over-budget.

Requirements are hard to understand and harder to specify. The wrong solution to this problem is to do a slipshod job of requirements specification, and rush ahead to design and code…. The right solution is to do whatever it takes to learn as many of the requirements as possible now. Do prototyping. Talk with more customers. Work for a month with a customer to get to know his or her job firsthand. Collect data. Do whatever it takes.