I spoke last time about the importance of getting good requirements for software and the invaluable role it can play in improving your software. However, the question remains – what is a good requirement then and what information do we need to create a requirement that provides the right level of technical detail?
So, today we will look at the different criteria requirements should have and what you need to consider when documenting them. Not all requirements may require the same level of detail, so what I will do in this post is provide a fairly exhaustive list of information that should form part of most software requirements, but then let you determine what might be relevant in your own organizations and cater them accordingly. The idea is for teams to use this as a guideline for templating future requirements.
Why should you use a common template for software requirements?
Before I provide the details though – I thought I would make a quick case for templating and why they are so important.
Using a common template for software requirements offers several advantages that enhance the overall software development process. Here are some key reasons why companies should adopt a standardized template:
Consistency
Uniformity: A common template ensures that all requirements are documented consistently, making it easier for everyone to follow and understand.
Reduced Ambiguity: Consistent formatting reduces the likelihood of misunderstandings and misinterpretations.
Efficiency
Streamlined Process: A standardized approach speeds up the process of writing and reviewing requirements, as stakeholders become familiar with the format.
Reusable Components: Common elements can be reused across different projects, saving time and effort.
Improved Communication
Clear Expectations: A common template sets clear expectations for the level of detail and type of information required, improving communication between teams.
Enhanced Collaboration: Teams can more easily collaborate and share information when everyone is using the same format.
Quality Assurance
Comprehensive Coverage: A standardized template ensures that all necessary information is included, reducing the risk of missing critical details.
Better Review and Validation: Consistent documentation facilitates thorough reviews and validation, ensuring requirements meet quality standards.
Traceability
Easy Tracking: A common template makes it easier to track requirements throughout the project lifecycle, from inception to implementation and testing.
Change Management: It simplifies the process of managing changes to requirements, as updates can be consistently applied across all documents.
Training and Onboarding
Simplified Training: New team members can be trained more efficiently with a standardized approach.
Faster Onboarding: Consistent documentation helps new employees quickly understand the project and their responsibilities.
Regulatory Compliance
Meeting Standards: Many industries have regulatory standards that require consistent and thorough documentation. A common template helps ensure compliance with these standards.
Audit Readiness: Standardized requirements documentation can simplify audits and reviews by regulatory bodies.
Scalability
Managing Complexity: As projects grow in size and complexity, a common template helps manage the increasing volume of requirements.
Cross-Project Consistency: It ensures that requirements across different projects are documented similarly, facilitating portfolio management and cross-project analysis.
Knowledge Retention
Organized Documentation: Consistent documentation practices help retain knowledge within the organization, making it easier to reference past projects and learn from previous experiences.
Historical Analysis: A common template allows for easier comparison and analysis of requirements from different projects, helping identify best practices and areas for improvement.
Customer Satisfaction
Clear Deliverables: Well-documented requirements lead to clearer deliverables and a better understanding of customer needs, enhancing customer satisfaction.
Reduced Rework: Clear and consistent requirements reduce the likelihood of rework due to misunderstood or incomplete requirements, leading to more efficient project completion.
What information do you want in your requirements?
So, now that we know why it’s important that we have conformity and a set template for creating requirements, let’s go into the detail of what you want in them:
Requirement ID
A unique identifier for each requirement. This is separate to its name which can be repeated across different requirements and makes or easy to trace the specifics of each requirement back to code and defect, while also managing change and impact better.
Purpose: To track and reference requirements easily.
Category/Type
The classification of the requirement (e.g., Functional, Non-functional, Security, Performance). This helps teams understand the nature of the requirement and can aid in mapping to specific outcomes and with prioritization.
Purpose: To organize and understand the nature of the requirement.
Title/Name
A brief, descriptive name for the requirement. This is short and should likely contain a keyword to make it easily identifiable to its purpose.
Purpose: To provide a quick reference and understanding of the requirement.
Description
A detailed explanation of the requirement. This is where the actual technical detail of the requirement comes in. This should include in detail what the functionality should do but also include details like user flows, architectural diagrams, and specific data required for input.
Purpose: To ensure all stakeholders understand what is needed and why.
Architectural Diagram
Where necessary, it’s useful for certain requirements to provide an updated architectural or user-flow diagram to show how the change impacts the great system. This also helps to map out some of the below items like dependencies, impact, and test permutations.
Purpose: To ensure the requirement change aligns to the broader architectural vision and better understand its impact.
Error Handling
A requirement shouldn’t just identify what a new adaptation is supposed to do, but also be clear about how it should behave when it’s not behaving as expected. Either due to incorrect data input or perhaps an error in the dependencies. A requirement should explain how the software should behave in failure and the specific error message that should be presented as well to help the team with future debugging and monitoring.
Purpose: To explain how the software should behave in moments of failure.
Priority
The importance of the requirement in relation to others (e.g., High, Medium, Low). This can also be adjusted to include values like (Must-Have, Like-to-have, etc) and is important in helping teams prioritize work – especially when needing to determine which items get them to focus and which can be pushed out till a later date. Often priorities can be time-sensitive and also change based on need, so as a team, it’s okay to frequently revisit the requirements and reprioritize them.
Purpose: To help prioritize development efforts and resource allocation.
Dependencies
Any other requirements or components that this requirement depends on or is related to. This is useful for development teams to understand their integration points to ensure they mock or test correctly with these areas and can then also align deployment and test coordination with these teams.
Purpose: To understand the relationships and impact on other parts of the project.
Stakeholders
Individuals or groups who have an interest in the requirement. These are people who will need to be informed about the different status of work. In modern software systems this should be kept to a minimum and communication will likely be automated – but it’s important to state many of these where required. Especially useful when working on larger releases with a wide number of requirements.
Purpose: To identify who needs to be consulted, informed, or involved.
Owner
The person who is responsible for initiating the requirement. This doesn’t need to be an induvial, but needs to provide the development team with people they can speak to should they need to understand the context in more detail. Especially if these people may be from outside the core team.
Purpose: To have a clear point of contact for questions and updates.
Rationale
The reason why the requirement is needed. Important to understand the business or technical context of why this is important and also the financial or risk impact it had on the business or the rest of the software to help understand the priority of it better.
Purpose: To provide context and justification for the requirement.
Status
The current state of the requirement (e.g., Proposed, Approved, In Progress, Completed). Useful to track if certain aspects of requirements are not approved or finalized, or perhaps track the implementation of requirements across the software delivery process.
Purpose: To track the progress and development stage of the requirement.
Version History
Record of changes made to the requirement. This might seem unnecessary but is especially useful when requirements evolve and some features may be built on outdated requirements. Having clear versioning helps to understand what was expected of functionality when it was first written and not necessarily how it might be understood in the current space. Software needs to evolve quickly so things can easily become outdated and versioning helps to best identify and address these areas of impact when changes occur,
Purpose: To maintain a history of updates and modifications for reference and traceability.
Implementation/Deployment Notes
Additional information on how the new software requirement might be implemented into the greater system. In many microservices each requirement can likely be split into its own user story and deployed independently, however in many larger systems – there is likely a process for how new additions will need to be added, tested, and deployed into the greater system as a larger release.
Purpose: To provide guidance and context for developers and technical teams.
Impact Analysis
Assessment of how the requirement will affect other parts of the system. This should include a level of risk and what possible outcomes on delivery that this particular new requirement will have on other requirements or software systems.
Purpose: To understand the potential implications and necessary adjustments.
Non-functional Attributes
Any specific attributes related to performance, security, usability, etc. This should be specific, especially in the case of performance and security where specific benchmarks and targets are required and should be understood by the respective development teams.
Purpose: To ensure non-functional aspects are considered and addressed.
Monitoring and Logging Requirements
This might not be applicable to every change, but it’s important that the requirements detail their impact on monitoring when it goes into production and what needs to be added or focused on in the monitoring process to identify if the change is causing an issue. Often this may just include existing monitoring that can be referenced. Additionally, there will be logging – either new or existing – that may need to be modified to reflect that this change is working.
Purpose: To understand the impact on monitoring and logging that this requirement may have.
Test Cases
Specific scenarios to test the requirement. This should include both positive and negative scenarios to ensure that coverage is clear for the team on how the software should behave under all circumstances.
Purpose: To ensure the requirement can be validated effectively.
Acceptance Criteria
Specific conditions must be met for the requirement to be considered complete. This includes important information outside of just test criteria that need to be in place for something to be released. It can include monitoring, security, or regulatory standards that need to be adhered to. Information around logging, error handling testing, and deployment and rollback testing should also be in here to ensure it has been correctly done.
Purpose: To provide clear guidelines for testing and validation.
As you can gather – there is a lot of information that needs to be considered by teams when putting together the various requirements for software projects. Now, reading through this you’re probably still a little uncertain about the difference between user stories – which are the main source of direction many agile software delivery teams take and some linger from technical requirements. I will get into this more in my next post – but for one, it’s important to know that the information required for any technical requirement is the same for a user story. Something which I will unpack in my next post.
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