How Do You Know If Your Requirements Are Good Enough?
Requirements must be good enough to let construction proceed at an acceptable level of risk. But how can you judge when you’re there?
A software team is never going to get a perfect set of requirements. Some could be incomplete, incorrect, unnecessary, infeasible, ambiguous, or missing entirely. Requirements sometimes conflict with each other. Yet the team still needs to build a product based on the available requirements information.
Practically speaking, the goal of the business analyst or product owner is to produce requirements that are good enough to allow the next development stage to proceed. It’s a question of risk. You should invest enough effort into requirements development to reduce the risk of performing excessive unplanned rework because of requirements shortcomings.
Unfortunately, no green light comes on when your requirements are good enough. It’s hard for a BA to judge if they’ve elicited all the pertinent requirements and stated them accurately. Yet, someone must decide when the next portion of the product’s requirements provides a suitable foundation for construction. Architects, designers, and developers can help make this judgment.
