REQUIREMENTS DEVELOPMENT

OVERVIEW

This session will provide an overview of requirements development

In this lesson, we will cover the following topics:

Introduction

Develop Customer Requirements

Develop Product Requirements

Analyze and Validate Requirements

Conclusion

By the end of this session, students will be able to:

1. Develop customer requirements

2. Develop product requirements

3. Analyze and validate requirements

INTRODUCTION

Mandy is a product manager working for a small start-up company in a major metropolitan area. The start-upThis company wants to go-has a goal of going public by 2016, so it’s determined to develop the type of products that will help it become an in-demand and highly valuable company by that goal date. Mandy’s organization develops tracking and logistics software for transportation industries, such as trucking and shipping.

As a product manager, Mandy is responsible for developing high-end web applications that can help their her clients track shipments when they are on the road. A great portion of Mandy’s job involves developing these products with the mindset needs of her customers

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and their needsin mind. She then attempts to build software that meetss these needs in order to help her organization improve its sales.

Mandy’s organization is about to conduct a major overhaul of its tracking software. The company’s stakeholders approach Mandy about ensuring that she will be able to create new tracking software that not only improves saleswant to ensure that the new tracking software will not only improve sales, but also meets the evolving needs of customers and end users. They want to ensure that Mandy iswill be able to identify all the requirements necessary for creating this new software, as well as identifying the needs and expectations of their clientele base. Mandy is determined to meet this challenge by developing one of the organization’s best tracking products yet.

To start identifying how she can create new tracking software for the organization, Mandy meets with the stakeholders to determine what their expectations and needs are. By doing this, Mandy is able to transfer the needs and expectations of the stakeholders to those of the customers and end users. Mandy believes that the needs of the stakeholders are similar to that of customers, which is why she thor-oughly surveysso she decides to survery the stakeholders to determ-ine what they expect from this new tracking software.

After her meeting with the stakeholders, Mandy is now in the posi-tion to develop product requirements. To do this, she identifies the resources, tasks, and other items that are critical to creating the tracking software. This involves gathering her project team together to brainstorm over the software components and identify the re-sources that will be needed to fulfil these components.

Once Mandy and her team hashave identified product requirements, her team moves forward to analyze and validate the product require-ments. This involves establishing operational concepts and scen-arios that allow the team to refine requirements as well as discover any new product requirements. After discovering all of the product requirements and analyzing how they’d perform in certain opera-tional concepts and scenarios, Mandy and her team begin building the new tracking software. Throughout the process, Mandy continu-ally reviews and analyzes the requirements to determine that they’re fulfilling process components. If any of the requirements are ex-

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traneous to the process or need to be adjusted, Mandy submits change requests to the organization’s stakeholders for approval.

Upon completing the new tracking software, Mandy and her team validate the product by giving it a final test. Once it’s determined to meet all stakeholder and customer requirements, the organization re-leases it to their clients. To the delight of the company stakeholders, the clients are very impressed by the new software. Thanks toLargely in part to word-of-mouth and successful marketing tech-niques, Mandy’s organization increases its sales and gains consider-able value, thus putting it closer to its goals of going public in 2016.

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The above story is an example of what’s known asa requirements development process. As demonstrated with Mandy’s efforts to de-velop new tracking software, requirements development is dedicated to examining work products and determining how end users and customers use these products. In addition to analyzing products from the point of view of the customer, requirements development allows business leaders to examine the product components to de-termine what resources and tools are necessary for production. This further strengthens the business leader’s ability to create a work product that suits the wants and needs of customers and end users.

Requirements development also involves documenting and tracking these components as the work product is being created. This can help business leaders ensure that the requirements are ensuring that the help the work product meets to meet all acceptance criteria. If the requirements need to change during the product development process, business leaders can submit change requests to relevant stakeholders and upper level management, as well as document these changes. This can be useful for similar projects in the future, as business leaders will have access to what requirements are appro-priate.

Before we continue to explore requirements development, it’s im-portant to define what requirements are. Requirements can be iden-tified as the following:

The resources that will be used by the project or work process

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The consumables that will be used by the project or work process

Any external resources and materials that should be supplied by vendors

The staff members and consultants that will be involved in the project or work process

The funding that will be allocated to the project or work pro-cess

The technologies that will be utilized during the project or work process

The facilities where the work product will be created

In order to effectively use the requirements development process, business leaders should outline these requirements at the beginning of every project or work process. This should help business leaders understand what components can already be supplied by the organ-ization and which requirements you’ll they’ll need to get from ex-ternal vendors.

Additionally, defining the requirements at the beginning of a project or work process should involve identifying when these resources and materials will be introduced to the process life cycle. It may help to document requirements and the process life cycle in a separ-ate document, which will be discussed in a later part of this course.

Requirements development can be critical to successfully creating high-quality work products. At the heart of requirements develop-ment is its ability to produce work products that are highly suited to meet the needs of customers and end users. Therefore, in order to make successful and in-demand work productswork products that fulfil customer needs, business leaders should use requirements de-velopment. Requirements development will typically occur in the following stages:

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1. Before work product creation. As Because requirements de-velopment is largely dedicated toward creating a high-qual-ity work product that will satisfy the end user’s needs, busi-ness leaders will want to canvasshould ask stakeholders for their opinions before the work process is implemented. This way, business leaders can gain a more accurate understand-ing of the wants and needs of the stakeholders, and thus, the work product’s users. These techniques will be explored in a later section of this course.

2. During the course of the work process. Requirements devel-opment is designed to allow business leaders to test product components in various scenarios and environments to de-termine its optimal use. This can help business leaders identify if any process components need to be improved or changedaltered in order to create a high-quality work product. Therefore, requirements development should be in-troduced throughout the work process cycle.

3. Before the work product is finished. Towards the end of the work process cycle, business leaders should conduct a test to determine if the final product accurately meets the needs of customers. This can be done through a variety of methods, which will be explored in a later section of this course.

Requirements development can be vital for creating successful work products because it simultaneously manages important process com-ponents as well as prioritizes the needs of the end user. This can help business leaders maintain a work process that’s efficient, timely, and produces work products that meet both organizational and customer needs.

Finally, requirements development can help the organization under-stand the various process components that are involved in creating a high-quality work product. This can help relevant stakeholders and upper management learn more about how work products are created, while team members can gain a comprehensive understanding of how a work product will potentially be used by end users. Both of these scenarios can result in anhelp the organization that’s highly ef-ficient and attunedfocus on to the wants and needs of its clientele base.

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This course will provide a comprehensive overview of requirements development. The purpose of requirements development (also known as RD) is to elicit, analyze, and establish customer, product and product component requirements. Like with requirements man-agement, requirements development can help business leaders dis-cover who is using their products and what these products and their components are being used for.

Business leaders will begin this course by learning to develop cus-tomer requirements, including eliciting needs and transforming stakeholder needs into customer requirements. Next, business lead-ers will learn to develop product requirements by establishing prod-uct and product requirements, allocating product component require-ments, and identifying interface requirements. Finally, Bbusiness leaders will also learn to analyze and validate requirements,. They will learn to establish organizational concepts and scenarios, and a definition of required functionality and quality attributes. Finally, bBusiness leaders will also learn to analyze requirements to achieve balance and validate requirements.

It’s worth noting that requirements development will involve many process areas that have been explored in previous courses. These will include stakeholder involvement, risk management, and require-ments management, among others. These processes will be re-viewed throughout this course in order to provide a comprehensive understanding of requirements development.

Before we explore how to conduct requirements development within your workplace, let’s take a moment to explore why requirements development can be crucial to helping your organization achieve its strategic and operational goals.

1. Requirements development helps you understand the wants and needs of your clientele base. Part of running a successful organization involves understanding precisely what your cus-tomers need from your organization. The more in-tune you are with your product’s end users, the more likely it is that you can develop high-quality products that will strengthen your company’s brand.

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2. Requirements development allows you and your team to gather your thoughts in a logical and productive way. With-out requirements development, it can be difficult to stay fo-cused on what customers require from your work products. By staying focused on product components and how they serve your end users, you can increase the chances of devel-oping a product that fulfills all your customers’ wants and needs.

3. Requirements development can help you identify any issues that are implicitly stated by customers or end users. Your customers may not explicitly state what they need from your work products, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have opinions about how your work products should function. By utilizing your stakeholders within the requirements develop-ment process, this makes itit will likely make it possible for you and your team to identify all customer needs that aren’t always explicitly communicated to your business.

While there are many benefits to using the requirements develop-ment process, there are also several significant challenges that busi-ness leaders will need to keep in mind. The challenges of using re-quirements development include the following:

Business leaders have little to nooften cannot invest the ap-propriate amount of time to carry out the requirements devel-opment process. Many business leaders give this reason for not may not carrying out requirements gatheringengage in re-quirements development because projects and work processes move at a quick pace. This means that business managers might not always emphasize the importance of requirements development due to the fact that they need to quickly imple-ment a project or work process.

Customers are unable or unwilling to communicate what they require from your work products. This can be a challenge for business leaders, especially if they’re unsure of how cus-tomers and end users intend to utilize their work products. Eliciting information from stakeholders can rectify this chal-lenge, but this also presents a new obstacle in the form of time constraints.

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The organization might not emphasize the importance of gathering requirements. Some companies might not see the point to requirements development, especially if the organiza-tion has successfully developed many several high-quality work products.

The organization or the business leader might assume they know what the customers want from the work products. However, Tthis can be a common mistake, especially in an organization that has been in business for a considerable length amount of time. The organization may assume that they’re meeting all customer needs as they’re still success-fully in businessbecause there business is running success-fully.

The bBusiness leaders might have difficulty recording or doc-umenting the work product requirements. If the organization doesn’t have a documentation system in place for require-ments, it can be difficult to successfully implement require-ments development and management.

The bBusiness leaders might dislike the requirements devel-opment and management process. This is a less common ob-stacle, although it’s still one that can present a challenge to organizations attempting to implement a requirements devel-opment and management process.

The organization might experience technological limitations. For example, if you discover that your work products aren’t meeting specific customer needs, you may discover that in-corporating a new product component requires a technology that you don’t have or can’t afford. If this occurs, you may need to appeal toask stakeholders for more funding or find a way to include these new technologies in your project or work process budget.

The cost of running requirements development might be too high for some organizations. Requirements development and management can take a significant amount of time, which may have an impact on your project budget. As a result,

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many business leaders may avoid requirements development and management in an effort to save project resources and funding.

The risks of running requirements development and manage-ment can be significant. While requirements development can minimize customer risks, it can increase financial and schedule risks. For example, if you’re creating a new work product, requirements development should allow you to mini-mize the risk of developing products that don’t suit customer needs. However, implementing requirements development can mean that your project schedule should will be pushed back, which can impact current milestones and deadlines. As requirements development can take a great deal of time, this means that your project budget may increase due to the lengthened schedule.

Regulations and laws can hinder requirements development. If you’re developing a new work product, you may discover that it will need to be in compliance with federal or state reg-ulations. This can pose a significant financial and schedule risk, which may impact the final work output.

While these are some of the main reasons why gathering and devel-oping requirements can be so difficult, Iit’s important for business leaders to realize that identifying and gathering requirements is a critical component to developing work products that meet customer expectations. Requirements development can make it easier for business leaders to identify product components that are essential for meeting customer demands. If you can do this, it’s much more likely that your organization will create the kind of work products that will strengthen your company brand, as well as help you man-age vital organizational strategies.

Now that requirements development has been defined and its bene-fits and limitations explored, let’s move forward and examine how to develop customer requirements by eliciting information from your stakeholders.

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DEVELOP CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS This section will explore communication techniques you can use to develop customer requirements with the aid of your stakeholders. This section will also examine the various strategies you can use to document these stakeholder needs and use them to establish and maintain customer functional and quality attributes.

In order to successfully develop and implement requirements within your work product process, it’s important for business leaders to un-derstand how to identify customer requirements. This can be a com-plex process, especially if your organization isn’t large enough or doesn’t have enough of a budget to gather customer surveys about your work products. Additionally, customers may not always be quick to explicitly point out what they want from your work products. This is why business leaders should look to their stake-holders in order to elicit information about customer wants and needs.

This section will explore communication techniques you can use to develop customer requirements with the aid of your stakeholders. This section will also examine the various strategies you can use to document these stakeholder needs and use them to establish and maintain customer functional and quality attributes.

Before we explore the various techniques and methodology that will be used to elicit needs from stakeholders, let’s explore how you should run requirements meetings. By running an organized and productive requirements meeting, you and your team will be able to quickly implement your work product process, which should help you provide your customers with the high-quality work products they need.

Like with all formal meetings within your organization, the require-ments development meeting should have an agenda. This will provide structure and content, as well as give your stakeholders and team members an idea of what you’d like to talk about. Be sure to provide this to your meeting members ahead of time, as this gives them an opportunity to prepare any questions or comments for the meeting. An example of a requirements meeting agenda should in-clude the following:

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1. An introduction of the stakeholders and team members who are attending the meeting. This can be important for the team members who may not have been introduced to these high-level organizational members, as they may not be as familiar with them as you are.

2. The objectives of the requirements meeting. You want to en-sure that your stakeholders and team members understand what will be discussed at the meeting. This agenda should also provide you with some structure, as it can keep you on track and focused throughout the requirements meeting. Be sure to prepare an outline of the objectives and ask for any in-put from your colleagues before the meeting.

3. The purpose of the work product process or project. During this part of the requirements meeting, you’ll want to outline to your stakeholders your ideas for the work product. You should outline how the work product will be created and in-clude any information on project schedules and limitations.

4. The expected outcomes or benefits of the work product. These should include both organizational and customer bene-fits.

5. The requirements of the customers who will be receiving the work product. This should take up a good portion of your re-quirements meeting, as this information can help your team focus on how product requirements will fulfil these customer needs. If you have any information regarding how your work product may meet the needs of your customers, you should introduce it at this point of the requirements meeting. If not, you can elicit customer needs by gathering stakeholder in-formation, which will be discussed in the next section.

6. The next steps that you and your team will take. At this point, you’ll want to outline how you’ll use valuable stake-holder information to create a high-quality work product that will fulfil the previously identified customer needs.

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Throughout the requirements meeting, you’ll want to foster an envir-onment where all ideas about customer requirements are welcomed. You should listen to all ideas that are presented and provide helpful feedback. You should also employ active listening skills to ensure that your stakeholders and team members feel as though their opin-ions and ideas are being valued. These techniques will be explored in a later section of this course.

Elicit Needs

When it comes to identifying customer wants and needs, you may think that you should survey your clientele base to determine how your work products can fulfil their needs. However, customers aren’t always able to articulate what they need from your organiza-tion. For example, they may not realize that they have a particular need until you introduce a product that fulfils it. Therefore, it often makes more sense to turn to your stakeholders to determine cus-tomer requirements.

Eliciting stakeholder needs is the first step to identifying customer requirements in the development process. In this stage of require-ments development, you and your team members should meet with your company’s stakeholders to elicit customer needs. By taking the time to meet with your stakeholders, your team will be able to identify and develop the requirements that can help your organiza-tion create high-quality work products.

In order Tto do this, business leaders mustshould engage relevant stakeholders by using communication methods for eliciting needs and expectations, as well as exploring constraints and external inter-faces. This may require utilizing the utilization of several commu-nication techniques that foster a productive and open environment for your stakeholders to share their ideas and opinions.

Business leaders may find the following communication techniques beneficial during the stakeholder meeting:

Outline the anticipated goals of the stakeholder meeting. When your stakeholders understand why you’re holding the meeting and what you hope to achieve from it, they should be

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more likely to identify customer requirements, as they’ll have more time to consider your objectives.

Once you’ve outlined the anticipated outcomes of the meet-ing, send the meeting agenda to all attendees. Let them know that all questions and issues will be addressed during the meeting. Be sure to send along an encouraging note asking your stakeholders to brainstorm customer requirements be-fore the meeting, as this may help significantly expedite the requirements identification process.

Brainstorm customer requirements with your team members before meeting with your stakeholders. This can present provide you with alternative solutions that you can present at the stakeholder meeting in case they need some assistance in coming up with potential customer requirements. For ex-ample, your stakeholders are having difficulty identifying what your primary customers require from your organiza-tion’s work products. You can lead the meeting with your al-ternative solutions to provide them with the examples they need to commit to the requirements development process.

Identify yourself as a stakeholder when creating the meeting agenda. By doing this, you should be able to pre-emptively address some of the questions and concerns your stakeholders might have regarding customer requirements. In order to identify what your stakeholders might hope to see during a meeting, structure the meeting according to how you will ad-dress the following issues:

o The reason why your stakeholders are at the meeting. For example, they’re at the meeting to aid you with identifying customer requirements.

o The information your stakeholders need to learn about your customers and work products. This should help them to better get intograsp the mindset of your organ-ization’s customers so as to identify their require-ments.

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o The information your stakeholders need to learn about the work product process. Again, this can help them better identify customer requirements.

o The information your stakeholders need to know about the organization’s primary goals and strategies, and how identifying customer requirements helps the com-pany achieve these. You may want to outline the or-ganization’s primary goals and strategies at the begin-ning of the stakeholder meeting.

By using this information to structure the stakeholder meet-ing, you it should be able to make it possible for your meet-ing attendees to quickly identify vital customer requirements.

Employ decisive active listening skills. Active listening means that you’re intently paying attention to what the other person is saying to you. This involves ensuring that you’re processing the information that a stakeholder is presenting to you and not thinking of retorts or comments that you’ll make once the stakeholder has completed his or her thoughtfinished speaking.

Active listening will also involve ensuring that your body language is encouraging an atmosphere of open collaboration. For example, if a stakeholder is presenting an idea about a possible customer requirement, sitting with your arms folded and your gazed focused elsewhere indicates that you’re dis-missive of the ideabeing dismissive. Be sure to sit with your back straight and meet the gaze of the speaker. Resist the urge to fidget or to sit with your arms crossed, as this may make the stakeholder feel as though you’re non-receptive to his or her ideas about customer requirements.

Avoid interrupting the stakeholder if he or she is presenting an idea about customer requirements. Interrupting can make your stakeholders feel as though you don’t value what they have to say, which may make them want to withdraw their feedback. This can be detrimental to the requirements devel-opment process, as you need input from your stakeholders in order to determine customer requirements.

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Confirm your understanding of what a stakeholder is trying to say. If you’re confused by a stakeholder’s ideas or opinions, don’t hesitate to ask for clarification. This can ensure that you properly understand what a stakeholder is attempting to communicate. If you still need further clarification, summar-ize what you believe athe stakeholder said and ask if it is cor-rect. If you and the stakeholder are still struggling to under-stand one another, you can request a one-on-one meeting at a later date to help clear up any misunderstandings. This way, your requirements meeting isn’t delayed by any miscommu-nications and clarifications.

Obtain stakeholder commitment right from the beginning of the meeting. You want your stakeholders to understand how identifying customer requirements can be crucial to the or-ganization’s success. If your work products are specifically designed to meet all of a customer’s wants and needs, this may make him or her more likely to become aof a loyal client of to your company.

Alert stakeholders to the potential risks that could occur dur-ing the requirements development process. While you want your stakeholders to understand why requirements are crucial to a work product’s success, you also want them to be pre-pared for any potential delays or expenses that could occur throughout the product development and management pro-cess. Being forthright with this information should make it easier to gain the stakeholder commitment that which can make the requirements development process easier to imple-ment.

Emphasize how important it is for your stakeholders to identify customer requirements. Let them know that they’re in the best position within the organization to identify these requirements and that their assistance is crucial. This can give your stakeholders the encouragement they need to identify additional customer requirements.This will make it more likely that your stakeholders will do their best to identify customer requirements.

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Document all ideas that are noted within the stakeholder meeting. You may find it beneficial to have a team member or administrative assistant sit in on the meeting to record minutes. This way, you can take the documentation back to your process or project team to review the ideas that were presented by the stakeholders.

Leave time at the end of the meeting for stakeholder ques-tions and answers. Be sure to emphasize the times you’ll be available for any follow-up questions or comments from stakeholders. Provide your email address and phone number on the meeting agenda document. By providing this informa-tion with the best times to contact you, your stakeholders will be assured that you and your team are available to address any issues regarding the work product’s development.

Schedule time directly after the meeting for stakeholders to meet with you in private, if necessary. If some of your stake-holders want to discuss the work product with you within the privacy of your officeprivately, this will give them the oppor-tunity to do so. If you don’t have the time to meet with an in-dividual stakeholder after the meeting, be sure to re-schedule as soon as time permits.

Send a follow-up email within the first day or so after the customer requirements meeting. This email should contain the minutes that were recorded at the customer requirements meeting. This email should also explicitly detail the cus-tomer requirements that were decided uponestablished at the meeting, including what steps will be taken next. This is an excellent way to summarize the requirements meeting and will let your organizational leaders know that your team is about to take the next step.

Now that you and your team have elicited stakeholder needs, you’ll need to transform this information into customer requirements.

Transform Stakeholder Needs into Customer Requirements

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Be sure to take the information that you gathered from your stake-holders and add it to customer requirements documentation. This documentation will detail how your work products will fulfil your customers’ requirements, which can also help keep your work pro-cess focused.

When translating stakeholder information into documented customer requirements, it’s important for business leaders to remember the following information:

Always write requirements in the language of the customer. This helps ensure that all focus is on the customer, including his or her wants and needs.

On a similar note, you’ll want to avoid incorporating tech-nical jargon in the customer requirements documentation. This can help ensure that your colleagues and team members can read your documented customer requirements without needing a translation.

Prioritize the customer requirements according to which ones your work product is most likely to impact. This will make it possible to identify a minimum quality threshold, which will be discussed momentarily.

Be sure that you spell out what the work product will not do to fulfil customer requirements. This can be just as important as emphasizing what it will do, as it can help you proactively identify customer requirements for future versions of your work product.

Keep the documentation clear and concise. Again, you’ll want to avoid clouding your findings with technical jargon, as this can may cause miscommunications.

Consider keeping a section in your documentation that details non-functional customer requirements. For example, this could include information on how your organization’s work products will meet a customer’s emotional needs, which dif-fers from his or her functional needs.

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Once you’ve documented your customer requirements, you and your team should establish customer functional and quality attributes re-quirements. This means that you should identify a minimum quality threshold for your work products, which entails choosing specific customer needs that must be met before the work product can be considered acceptable.

For example, if your organization is developing a vitamin supple-ment that’s designed to strengthen joints, developing a minimum quality threshold might involve these acceptance criteria:

The vitamin supplement must strengthen joints by at least 20%

The vitamin supplement must alleviate joint pain and discom-fort by at least 30%.

The vitamin supplement must include several minerals that aid the body in absorbing the vitamins.

These acceptance criteria may involve holding clinical trials where subjects report their joint pain before the trial begins and after they’ve been taking the vitamin supplement for six weeks.

As this example demonstrates, documenting a minimum quality threshold and acceptance criteria should help the organization de-termine when the work product can meet a customer’s biggest needs.

Before designing your minimum quality threshold, you may find it beneficial to prioritize the customer needs that were previously iden-tified during the stakeholder meeting. This can help you identify when a work product meets the primary functional needs of a cus-tomer, which can then help you focus on tweaking the product to meet any secondary needs.

Now that you’ve learned how to discover and document customer requirements, you can move forward to develop product components that fulfil these requirements.

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DEVELOP PRODUCT REQUIREMENTS

A major part of the requirements development process involves evaluating, developing, and documenting product requirements with the aid of your team members. These product requirements are cru-cial to establish because it can help your team create a better work product for your customers.

Product requirements can be defined as the resources, materials, and components that are vital to create a work product. Product require-ments can be easier to identify after documenting customer needs because it can help provide your work process with direction. Product component requirements are similar to product requirements in that you should identify the parts of the product that will fulfil the customers’ wants and needs. For example, if your customers indic-ate that they need your work products to be of a certain quality, you and your team will have a better idea of what resources and materi-als you’ll need to acquire in order to achieve this minimum quality threshold. This is also an important step in establishing acceptance criteria, which will be explored in a later section of this course.

Let’s begin this section by learning how you can establish product and product component requirements.

Establish Product and Product Component Requirements

Product and product component requirements are not only critical to ensuring that your work products meet your customers’ needs. Es-tablishing product and product component requirements can help you understand what resources and materials need to be introduced throughout the project work cycle. This can aid your team in creat-ing a high-quality work product, as various requirements should be incorporated into the work product process at appropriate times.

This stage of the requirements development process should be ded-icated to identifying how the requirements will be allocated to em-ployees and product components. This can involve identifying risks, work product functions, test issues, and other entities that need to be documented. Once these are documented, business leaders should

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create a work product that meets minimum functional requirements. After these criteria have been met, the work product can be further refined until optimal results have been achieved.

Now that working definitions of product and product component re-quirements have been established, let’s move forward to examine how you can identify these requirements so as toand introduce them into the requirements development lifecycle.

First, it’s important to realize that many of your customer require-ments will be written in non-technical terms. As previously dis-cussed in an earlier section, this is done to help business leaders get in the mindset of the customer in order to identify all of their re-quirements. While this may be essential for the beginning stages of requirements development, this can be a significant challenge for your design team. These employees However, your design team may need more technical information before they can move forward with the product design process.

Therefore, business leaders may find it beneficial to translate cus-tomer requirements into technical terms that can be used for product and product component design.

To do this, be sure to gather your product design team together and provide them with the customer requirements documentation. You may have a difficult time translating the non-technical terms into something that your design team can understand, so it’s best to make this a collaborative effort. Hold a meeting with your product design team and review the customer requirements. Ensure that the design team understands what the customers need from the work products and how the product components should meet these needs.

Once the design team has this information in hand, they should be able to make suggestions on how to move forward from there. Be sure to document their suggestions. Ask for times when you’ll be able to follow up with them through the work process. To ensure that the work product is being designed to your specifications, you may find it beneficial to schedule multiple project milestones. This way you can minimize the risks of creating a work product that doesn’t meet the customer requirements.

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Throughout the product design process, you may need to identify additional requirements that derive from design decisions. For ex-ample, if your design team indicates that your work product needs to be created using a new technology, this means that you should identify the requirements associated with this technology. Apart from purchasing the new technology, these requirements could in-clude achieving the following:

Getting more funding from upper management and stake-holders to procure the technology

Finding employees who can work the new technology or training those personnel who seem the most capable at using it

Identifying when to introduce the new technology into the project’s lifecycle.

Re-adjusting schedule milestones and deadlines as a result of the technology’s introduction to the design lifecycle

Conducting follow-up reviews to determine if the new tech-nology is allowing the work product to meet minimum qual-ity threshold.

Identifying new requirements associated with any design elements can help you adjust the work product cycle accordingly, as well as minimize any schedule or financial risks.

In addition to identifying new requirements involved in the design process, business leaders will want to work closely with the design team to develop architectural requirements that help the work product meet customer requirements. This essentially means that your design team will understand what a high-quality work product will look like, as well as how it will function. This can provide your design team with the focus they need, as they should be able to identify when the work product has met the minimum functional at-tributes that were previously identified during the customerscus-tomer’s requirements meeting with your stakeholders.

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Finally, business leaders will find it beneficial to continually review the requirements that are essential to the design process. This should help you identify when any change requests need to be made in case your design team needs new resources or materials to create the work product. By staying up-to-date with change request needs, you can help ensure that stakeholders quickly approve all changes and that new resources are efficiently provided to the design team.

Now that you’ve established product and product component re-quirements with the aid of your design team, you can allocate product component requirements.

Allocate Product Component Requirements

Allocating product component requirements means that you and your team will identify the resources that are essential to success-fully achieving work product functions. In addition to allocating re-quirements to product components, this stage of requirements devel-opment involves identifying product performance markers, design constraints, and the form the work product will take.

To implement this stage, it’s vital for business leaders to have all work product documentation on hand. This may include customer requirements, previously identified product functions, and require-ment allocation sheets. Once this information is in hand, you should have a better idea of how resources and materials should be alloc-ated to your work product’s components. As you conduct the alloc-ation process, be sure to document all of your decisions and share them with your team members. For instant access, you could upload the documentation to a shared server or email the document. You may even find it beneficial to provide this documentation to your stakeholders.

Be sure to make note of how the requirements allocations will aid in reducing design constraints and other project risks. This should help minimize the possibility of any project delays, as well as help your design team produce a high-quality work product in a timely and convenient manner.

Business leaders will also want to ensure that they’ve allocated re-quirements to work product delivery increments. In other words, be

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sure that you have the resources and materials you need to deliver the work products to relevant customers and departments. For ex-ample, if you’re creating new software for another department in your organization, you should allocate requirements to major deliv-ery increments. This can include testing phases and the final work product delivery.

Once you’ve allocated all of the requirements to your product com-ponents, you should document the relationship between the allocated requirements. This can help you determine how various require-ments interact with one another and how they aid in speeding up or hindering the work product process. This can also assist you in identifying dependencies that may exist in the work product design process. Identifying these dependencies can help you understand when certain resources should be introduced into the work product design process, which should aid in minimizing schedule and finan-cial risks.

By documenting the relationship between allocated requirements, you will have this valuable information on hand for future projects that are similar in their scope. Now that you’ve allocated the re-quirements to various product components, you’re ready to identify interface requirements.Once you’ve allocated the requirements to various product components, you can identify interface require-ments.

Identify Interface Requirements

Interface requirements can be defined as the relationships between various work product functions. By identifying how a work product’s functions interact with one another, you should be able to come up with minimum functional attributes as well as develop al-ternative solutions should your work product not achieve your or-ganization’s acceptance criteria. If your work product does not meet your organization’s acceptance criteria.

Interface requirements are essential to creating a successful work product because they help your organization integrate all product components to create a fully functional work product. Business leaders should expect to test these work products to determine that

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all product components have been successfully integrated and meet all the acceptance criteria.

Now that interface requirements have been defined, let’s explore how business leaders can identify these requirements within the or-ganization’s work product process. You should begin by identify-ing interfaces that are both external and internal to the product. This includes examining how various product components interact as well as exploring how the work product functions outside of the workplace.

To accomplish this step, business leaders should take a close look at how the work product interacts with the following internal and ex-ternal interfaces:

Testing equipment

Transportation systems

IT and support systems

Manufacturing facilities

By examining how the work product interfaces with these systems and facilities, you and your employees should have a better idea of what additional requirements are needed for the work product. Be sure to document these requirements and add them to the require-ments allocation sheet you created in an earlier section. This should help you gain clarity on how your resources are being allocated and which requirements still need to be met.

Now that you’ve established product and product component re-quirements, you and your team can analyze and validate the identi-fied requirements.

ANALYZE AND VALIDATE REQUIREMENTS

Analyzing and validating customer and product requirements is a crucial state part of the requirements development process. This part of the processcan allows business leaders to analyze how the

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work product will be used within the customer’s environment and if the current product can fulfil its functional attributes.

By exploring and validating these requirements, business leaders can take steps to understand how customers will use their work products. In addition to aiding in the development of an exceptional work product, these exploratory stages can assist business leaders in identifying even more customer needs. This information can be used to develop future work products that will meet these needs as well as help the organization achieve its biggest strategic and operational goals.

Analyzing the requirements will also allow business leaders to de-termine if the work product has fulfilled stakeholder needs and cri-teria, and as a result, customer requirements. Many considerations will be involved in the analysis process, which may include the fol-lowing:

The feasibility of the work product

The cost constraints of developing the work product

The potential market size that the work product can be ex-posed to

The strategies that will be used to market the work product

These components should be involved in the analysis process, as they may change your work product’s requirements and compon-ents.

In addition to this analysis, business leaders will also want to estab-lish a clear definition of what a fully function work product will look like. This should help your team understand when the work product has met its functional criteria and quality attributes. It can also be easier to make smaller refinements to a work product once your team understands that the product has met its primary functional role.

All of these processes will be done in order to determine if the work product will appropriately function within its intended environment.

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Therefore, Llet’s examine how business leaders can implement this stage of the requirements development process by establishing oper-ational concepts and scenarios. Establish Operational Concepts and Scenarios

To begin this stage of the requirements development process, busi-ness leaders should create operational concepts and scenarios that might involve their work products. In other words, you and your team should be able to brainstorm potential scenarios that your work product might be used in. By establishing operational concepts and scenarios, you can test to determine if the work product will satisfy its intended functional requirements.

To do this, it’s recommended that business leaders utilize the fol-lowing steps:

Brainstorm operational concepts with the aid of your team members. For example, if you’ve created project manage-ment software, you should come up with several scenarios in which the software will be involved, like in an at-home office or a corporate environment.

Define the environment where the work product will operate. The more detailed you are about the environment where the work product will be used, the more likely it is that you can determine when a work product has met its functional crite-ria.

Review these concepts with the aid of your team members to discover how your work product will operate. If it’s deter-mined that the work product won’t meet its functional at-tributes, identify additional requirements that help improve the product.

Document the results of your operational concepts. If it was determined that you need alternative requirements to improve the work product, be sure to map out what identify these re-quirements, how they will be introduced into the product’s lifecycle, and what the expected outcomes will be.

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Once you’ve tested your work product with these operational con-cepts and scenarios, you can move forward by establishing a defini-tion of required functionality and quality attributes.

Establish a Definition of Required Functionality and Quality At-tributes

In order to determine that your work product has achieved its func-tional and quality attributes, it’s important for business leaders to spell out what those functional and quality attributes are in the first place. This can be achieved by utilizing the following steps:

Determine the key mission of the work product and how it will help your organization achieve various operational and strategic goals. By outlining the primary goals and missions of the work product, you and your team should have a better idea of what a fully functional, high-quality work product should look like.

Identify what the desired functionality and quality attributes of the work product will look like. This can be achieved by going over your customer requirements and combining them with your organizational goals. While the desired functional-ity and quality attributes will vary according to your products and organizational needs, these attributes should focus on providing your end users with a satisfying and intuitive work product experience.

Determine which quality attributes can be directly linked to the design and architecture of the work product. In other words, the design of your work product should assist in ful-filling primary customer wants and needs.

Once you have a working definition of what a high quality, fully functional work product looks like, you may want to consider testing your product by supplying it to a small clientele base and gathering their feedback. This testing method can be extremely useful for de-termining if the quality and functionality required by end users has been met. Additionally, it can also help business leaders identify

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what alternative requirements can be introduced to the product’s lifecycle process if it fails to live up to customer standards.

Be sure to document all of your definitions and tests. This can help you keep track of the allocated requirements, which can be useful in times when you need to submit multiple change requests to upper management and relevant stakeholders. Documenting your tests can also help you and your team identify what objects, people, or sup-port elements can be added to the work product in order to achieve its maximum functional and quality thresholds.

Once you and your requirements team have a working definition of the work product’s required functionality and quality attributes, you can move to the next part of the development stage, which involves analyzing requirements.

Analyze Requirements

Analyzing all of the requirements gathered for the work product can help business leaders better understand how these resources and ma-terials support a high-quality work product. Analyzing requirements should place a strong emphasis on determining if the basic resources support the more refined functions of the work product.

In order to do this, business leaders may want to break down the work product into a hierarchy of functions. The lower hierarchy will be the product’s primary function, while the higher hierarchy will be the more refined and sophisticated product functions. This can aid business leaders in determining how the requirements at the lower hierarchy help support the requirements at the top level of the hierar-chy.

To successfully analyze requirements, business leaders will want toshould utilize the following steps:

Re-analyze stakeholder needs and expectations to determine if the work products meet them. If not, you and you team should re-consider the requirements and create alternative so-lutions until you develop a fully functional work product.

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Analyze the requirements to determine if they support the higher-level functions of the work product. As previously mentioned, this will involve determining if your lower level requirements can support higher level requirements and thus, the work product’s refined functions.

Analyze all the requirements to determine if they’re feasible and verifiable. You don’t want to implement requirements if they pose considerable financial risk to your organization or if they will prolong your project’s work schedule. Addition-ally, you want to ensure that you can track and measure how the requirements interface with the work product. This will help ensure that you can replicate the results of the work process in different facilities or at a future time.

Identify the requirements that are most likely to influence the cost of creating the work product. You should also analyze requirements according to how they’ll influence the work product’s schedule, performance or risk. This should help you and your team better prepare for the work process by cre-ating an accurate budget and identifying solutions to mini-mize risk.

Analyze these requirements within the context of the opera-tional scenarios you identified in an earlier section of this course. This may allow your requirements team to refine the customer needs, as well as discover new customer and prod-uct requirements.

Once your requirements have undergone this examination, you’ll want to analyze the requirements one last time to ensure that they achieve balance within the work product.

Analyze Requirements to Achieve Balance

Analyzing requirements to achieve balance means that your final work product should balance both customer needs and organiza-tional constraints. In other words, your work product should be able to meet required functionality and quality attributes without strain-ing your organization’s resources. For example, if you’ve practi-cally drained your company’s resources in order to create high-pow-

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ered software for your customers, your requirements are not prop-erly balanced.

To analyze requirements in order to achieve balance through re-quirements, business leaders should utilize the following techniques:

Use proven models and simulations to determine if customer needs and organizational constraints have been properly bal-anced. This means testing to determine if your work product fulfills customer requirements while adhering to organiza-tional constraints that may have been identified by your stakeholders during the requirements meeting.

Perform a risk assessment of the work product to determine if your organization may be strained by its development and re-lease. For example, if your risk assessment demonstrates that your work product will cost too much to produce over the long-term, you may want to adjust its required functionality and quality attributes as necessary.

Examine the product’s lifecycle to determine if the require-ments create any unexpected risks. For example, this exami-nation may reveal that incorporating certain resources into the work product can leave your organization financially vulnera-ble. This can help you and your requirements team determine if there are any alternative resources that won’t strain your or-ganization’s finances.

Once you’ve determined that the requirements have achieved bal-ance between customer needs and organizational constraints, you can move forward to the last stage of requirements development, which involves validating requirements.

Validate Requirements

The process of validating requirements is done in order to provide business leaders with the confidence that all requirements will fulfill the required functionality and quality attributes of a work product. This can also make for a much smoother work product process, as you and your team won’t continually need to re-examine your re-quirements. This can save you a considerable amount of time during

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the project process as well as help your organization save valuable resources.

In order to validate the work product’s requirements, business lead-ers should take the following steps:

Analyze the requirements to determine if there are any risks that the work product won’t function as it should. If they haven’t already, business leaders may want to consider test-ing the work product with a small sample of customers. This will help you determine if the work product is being used ap-propriately by end users and if itsit’s performing as intended within the end user’s environment.

Analyze the requirements by having your stakeholders exam-ine the work product and use it in its intended environment. As your stakeholders were used to determine customer re-quirements, positive stakeholder feedback should generally indicate that your end users will be able to successfully use the work product.

You should give your stakeholders plenty of time to use and test the work product to determine if it’s properly functional. After the test time has concluded, have a follow-up meeting with your stakeholders to gather their feedback. Encourage them to be as specific as possible with their feedback, as this will help you and your development team create a high-qual-ity work product. If they have any negative feedback regard-ing the work product, have them be as specific as possible with their comments. This can provide you with the neces-sary insight to identify alternative requirements that may pro-duce a better work product.

Assess the product design as it’s developed throughout its various stages. The goal of this is to identify any validation issues, as well as expose customer requirements and needs that were previously unidentified during the requirements meeting. Be sure to outline how you and your team will ap-proach these new customer requirements and needs. You may want to prepare ahead of time by documenting how new requirements should be introduced to the work product cycle.

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Provide this documentation to your stakeholders and team members, as they will want to know how new requirements will be handled.

After you’ve achieved this last stage of requirements development, you should ensure that all relevant documentation is properly stored and secured for future use. Requirements development for future work products can be made much easier with a previous framework-this documentation. Therefore, you may want to consider uploading your requirements development documentation to a secured server or to a file cabinet that has restricted access. This can help you eas-ily locate the documentation for future projects, as well as ensure that the integrity of the documentation is preserved.

CONCLUSION With regards to requirements development, it’s vital for business leaders and their employees to understand how these resources, ma-terials, and people are incorporate into a work product’s lifecycle. From the moment the stakeholders identify customer requirements until long after the work product is released to your customers, you should be able to use requirements development to help ensure that your work product has achieved its optimal required functionality and quality attributes. This is not only important from the perspect-ive of your customers, but it is also vital to helping your organiza-tion achieve its most important goals and strategies. If your brand is associated with high-quality products that fulfil customer wants and needs, this will create a positive company reputation that may result in more customers and profits.

With this in mind, let’s briefly recap what you learned throughout this requirements development course:

You learned what requirements development is and why it’s so critical to designing high-quality work products

You discovered how your stakeholders can assist you in identifying customer wants and needs

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You learned the communication techniques for eliciting the most stakeholder information throughout your requirements meeting

You discovered how to use this information to develop re-quired functionality and quality attributes

You learned how to create scenarios that could help you and your team determine if your work products would properly function within its intended environment

You discovered how to validate and analyze requirements by using a variety of techniques designed to help your work product achieve balance between customer needs and organ-izational constraints

With these techniques at hand, it should be much easier for you and your team to identify, establish, and validate the requirements that are crucial to creating a high-quality work product. By emphasizing how important requirements are to your organization’s work products, you can ensure that all staff members, managers, and stakeholders understand how these key resources, materials, and people play a role in driving the organization toward its primary op-erational and strategic goals.

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