Improving requirement statements
There is an art to writing requirement statements. It’s easy to write vague or useless requirements, so you need to be strict and follow a particular style. Specifically, your requirements should have the following properties:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Agreed
- Realistic
- Complete
- Consistent
- Independent
- No implementation details
This section will examine each of those qualities in turn. The first four come from the SMART acronym for management objectives and are a great guide to writing goals in general. The T in SMART stands for timed, and that’s one aspect that these requirements don’t need to cover. Project planning is a skill that is beyond the scope of this book, but it isn’t necessary for the functional requirements. It only records what the product should do, not when. Let’s compare two requirements to illustrate the qualities that requirements need to have:
A. Reading the...
