AM2D Software Systems Consulting

Requirements naturally precede all development activities: without business needs, goals, or objectives there would be no incentive to develop a system solution. Hence, requirements are in many ways the foundation of our systems development. Without clear, well defined and unambiguous requirements our architectural and design decisions will be ill-informed at best, guesswork at the worst!

AM2D requirements management process:

1.    Elicitation and Gathering

• Interviews
  
• Questionnaires
  
• Observation
  
• Demonstration
  
• Brainstorming
  

2.    Analysis, Modelling and Development

• Enumerate all requirements
  
• Produce a requirement model (UML or BPMN)
  
• Ensure requirements completeness
  
• Segregate requirements into core functional and ancillary-functional requirements: at AM2D we adopt the classification of requirements as defined by Murali Chemuturi [ref:] in his book "Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects" where what is commonaly referred to as functional requirements are defined as "core functionality requirements" (CFR), and non-functional requirements are defined as "ancillary functionality requirements (AFR).
  
• Group CFR's and AFR's into their respective logical groups.
  
• Remove duplications and modify or eliminate contradictory requirements.
  
• Prioritize requirements.
  

3.    Establishment

• Create formal documentation: User Requirements Specification (URS) and Software Requirements Specification (SRS): formalise requirements models and documents.
• Qualty Assurance (QA): Validation (are we building the right system?):
• scenario testing
• expert reviews
• end user reviews

and verification (are we building the system correctly?):

• peer reviews
• Independent reviews
• Executive and managerial reviews
• Approvals Acceptance: approval sign-off from all relevant stakeholders.
• Configuration Management: place all approved documents, models etc. under configuration management.

4.    Traceability

• Links are established (usually as part of the model creation process) for all requirements to all other related requirement elements.
• In a fully integrated solution links are also established to architectural design modules (objects, classes etc).