Essay 5 - Using the Requirements

date:2005-09-07 10:10:35 category:War Stories and Advice

Requirements have a number of uses.

1. They document progress. This management value is sometimes the only value placed on requirements. This happens when requirements are really just high-level design and don’t describe the problem adequately.
2. They test candidate architectures. This is done well when there is a back and forth between requirements are architecture. We gather requirements and propose an architecture. If the architecture isn’t desirable, either the requirements are incomplete, or the architecture is incorrect. We add or adjust the requirements, or we modify the architecture. This process can and should iterate until the requirements cannot be changed further.
3. They quantify and qualify design alternatives. Once the overall architecture for a solution has been chosen, the requirements should continue to add value by providing guidance into selection of design patterns for implementation.
4. They describe the final acceptance test. If the requirements are not measurable enough to act as a final test, then they need clarification.

The back-and-forth between requirements and architecture takes many paths, each of which helps clarify the requirements.

Sometimes an architecture is too complex or expensive. The requirements often include some non-functional features that drive up costs. Other times, a use case has too much automation, or is otherwise poorly constrained and leads to large costs in software purchases or development.

Sometimes an architecture is incomplete. The requirements are often vague or incomplete, allowing a too-simple architecture to appear to be a solution.

Sometimes the architecture seems to have the wrong components or focus. This is often the case when the requirements writers had a specific technology in mind, and weren’t open to alternative solutions to the problem. In this case, the traceability between architecture and requirements has to be examined to see if a change to the requirements is really necessary. Sometimes a formal proof of concept is necessary to convince the reviewers that the proposed architecture does meet the requirements, even when it is not the expected solution.

The big failures occur when the project plan has a strict, one-way waterfall from requirements to architecture to implementation with no back-and-forth. That is madness because then every bad idea in the requirements becomes an architectural feature adding cost and risk; any attempt to revoke a bad idea becomes scope creep and the project collapses.

Cause of death: a lack of useful interplay between requirements and architecture.