The Volere Process
Perhaps the most documented and complete approach to requirements gathering is found in the Volere Process. You can use it as a base for the process that I recommend to gather requirements.
Gathering Customer Requirements
Simply put, IS teams who make a concerted effort to manage customer requirements do so because they want to satisfy their customer needs by having their projects succeed. Research studies find that the majority of project failures are related in some way to changing customer requirements.
This section is based on a modified Volere Requirements Process and its associated Specification Template. I have found this to be a best practice. Originally designed for use in systems application development, the process is a generic requirements gathering and specification process whose principles can be applied to small and large projects across varied industries. These processes are discussed in detail in the next section. Before I get into those details, I need to put a few definitions in place.
What Are Requirements?
Requirements are the things that you should discover before starting to fully design, build, or execute a project. Discovering the requirements during execution/construction is inefficient and detrimental.
A requirement exists either because the type of product demands certain functions or qualities, or the client wants the requirements to be part of the product/ project delivery.
Project requirements start with what the customer really ...
Get Effective Software Project Management now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
