Why Are Requirements So Poorly Defined?

Studies have shown that the quality of the requirements is one of the most important factors in the quality of an application and also in the time and costs required to deliver a system. Yet requirements are almost always ambiguous, incorrect, incomplete, too high level, logically inconsistent, and communicated by rumor. The irony is that the various techniques-which have been around for decades-for writing better requirements have not been widely adopted. The culture and the management of the software process are equally to blame. Richard Bender gets to the root of the problem and discusses ways to address the poor requirements issues. Learn quantitative measures of the quality of the requirements specification and practical approaches to writing unambiguous requirements for your applications.

• Early validation of requirements through testing
• Moving user acceptance test design up prior to the start of coding
• Getting management's support for improvements