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Writing Good Requirements

Course Category: Fundamentals
Course Duration: 1 day
Course Credit: 7 PDU, 7 CDU
Prerequisites: None

On-Site Course Pricing:

  • 15 or Fewer Students: $7400
  • 16-30 Students: $9300

The most common reasons for project and product failures are problems with requirements. These problems won't go away unless the requirement writers, reviewers, and managers understand what a good requirement is and why defective requirements keep happening.

Requirement defects are best identified as requirements are written, not weeks or months later by a review of a large, defective document.

Early validation of requirements can:

  • Greatly reduce the requirement writing time
  • Reduce the time and effort of a formal review
  • Ensure you get the important feedback in a formal review
  • Reduce rework for requirements misunderstood by designers
  • Reduce retest required for requirements misunderstood by testers
  • Reduce the number of problems found by users
  • Result in a shorter development cycle with a higher quality product

“I thoroughly enjoyed the requirements writing class I took from Lou at Requirements Experts. I found the training refreshing, and, in my opinion, this knowledge is a crucial part of being a good contract monitor. Requirements Experts presented the course material dynamically and they obviously know this subject very well.”

—Nick Kepics, Federal Contract Monitor

Course Objective

To provide knowledge for avoiding requirement defects in the first place and for creating systematic review processes, such as checklists, that help identify and remove requirement defects as requirements are captured.

Develop skills that enable you to:

  • Quickly identify and fix requirement defects that you commonly make
  • Understand why you are seeing defects from others and fix your process to avoid these defects in the future
  • Use rationale to clarify each requirement so that it is understood just one way and you have a history of why it exist for future change impact assessments and for maintenance and verification
  • Use attributes such as verification method, allocation, and traceability to improve your requirement set
  • Write different types of requirements
  • Validate your requirements as they are written to avoid submitting a bad document for review, causing delay while problems are fixed or causing design problems because the problems are not fixed in a timely fashion.

Course Outline

  • Overview requirement in product life-cycle and brief preview of Scope
  • The cause and impact of requirement defects*
  • How to identify and prevent requirement defects*
  • How to use rationale to ensure requirements are understood only one way*
  • How to use verification method to make sure your requirement is verifiable*
  • Different levels of requirements and basics of allocation and traceability between levels
  • How to use templates for organizing requirements
  • Make sure you cover all requirement categories – functional and performance, interface, operational, "-ilities" (such as reliability and supportability), physical, environmental, and design and construction categories*

* includes examples and student exercises

Intended Audience

This training is critical for those responsible for capturing and documenting requirements. Representatives of all the product's stakeholders will be involved in developing, reviewing, and approving requirements, and this training will benefit them and your requirement effort. DO NOT let anyone review your requirements without this training or without at least providing them your standards for good requirements.

  • System Engineers (SE)
  • Requirement Engineers (RE)
  • Business Analysts (BA)
  • Subject Matter Experts (SME)
  • Program and Project Managers (PM)
  • Developers
  • Testers
  • Independent verification and validation (IVV) team
  • Customers
  • Users
  • Marketing

Build On This Training

If your organization is looking for additional training, also consider our 2- and 3-day seminars where we cover all the content of "Writing Good Requirements" and more.

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