Software Requirements Essentials: Core Practices for Successful Business Analysis

Chapter 2

Laying the Foundation

In the classical pure (and hypothetical) waterfall software development model, the team accumulates a complete set of requirements for the product, designs a solution, builds the entire solution, tests it all, and delivers it. We all know that approach doesn’t work well in most cases.

Projects will vary in how much requirements work can, and should, be done up front. Sometimes it’s possible to specify a good portion of the requirements for an information system before getting too far into implementation. Complex products with multiple hardware and software components demand careful requirements engineering because the cost of making late changes is high. For applications that change rapidly or lend themselves ...