Measuring requirement quality can reveal opportunities for long-term improvements in requirement definition, can show you where to invest for improvements, and can help you develop your team.
Opportunities for improvement
If requirement quality isn’t measured, there will be no future improvement in requirements. Every project – in terms of requirements quality – will be a rerun of the last project. No lessons learned. No forward progression.
Did your last project have rework? Were there any crisis situations in testing? Were there customer complaints? A review of the last project’s requirements may show you how to avoid some of those same headaches on your current and future projects.
Investing in improvements
If you don’t know where the problems are, you can’t fix them. The consequences of requirement errors usually don’t become apparent until late in the development process and then those consequences can be quite expensive and very damaging to your project. It’s easy to confuse them with design errors or testing problems.
Given our cultural predisposition toward firefighting, developers will focus on the design or test phase fires caused by these errors rather than the errors themselves. Because the spending rate is higher in these latter phases, managers will focus on putting out fires, as opposed to preventing them. The latest CAD tools or the best test engineers, however, can at most trim the cost of requirement errors, not fix them.
You need to know if your problems stem from bad requirements or from something else. It is not enough to simply allocate 10% of the project’s resources to requirement definition to realize a 50% savings in implementation and test. You must invest the 10% where it will have the greatest impact.
Measuring helps develop the team
As you learn more about where your requirements errors are, you can invest wisely in training project team members. For example, numerous ambiguous requirements suggest that they need training in writing requirements. Lots of omitted requirements signal a need for training in the processes they are writing the requirements for – to create better understanding. Alternatively, instead of process training for people you already have, you may want to recruit people to the team who already possess the proper experience in the area.
Summary
Measurement is the foundation for improvement. It’s unfortunate that managers often feel that measuring requirement quality is complex and expensive. Some feel that it will kill their budget while others feel they can’t measure the quality of requirements until the project is over.
In reality, requirement quality should be reviewed and assessed throughout the engagement. Remember “better, cheaper, faster?” Invest more upfront and achieve better requirements and less rework. But the need to continually assess requirement quality throughout the project is still there - to ensure that the solution you’ll be implementing is what the end user is expecting.