10 Requirements Traps to Avoid
Slighting requirements development and management are sure-fire impediments to project success.
Slighting requirements development and management often leads to software projects that struggle or fail. Here are ten common traps projects can encounter if people don’t take requirements seriously. I describe symptoms that might indicate you’re falling victim to each trap, along with some possible solutions. More information about all of these traps can be found in Software Requirements, 3rd Edition by Karl Wiegers and Joy Beatty.
Trap #1: Confusion about What Requirements Are
Symptoms: The word requirements means different things to different people. An executive’s notion of requirements could be a high-level product concept or a business vision. A developer’s requirements might look like user interface designs. Customer-provided requirements often are really solution ideas (see Trap #10).
One warning sign is that stakeholders refer to “the requirements” with no qualifying adjectives. The project participants will have different expectations of how much requirements detail to expect. Another symptom is that users provide “the requirements” but developers still aren’t quite sure what to build. Discussions that focus…
