Guideline: Solution: Effectively Elicit Requirements
Effectively communicate with stakeholders to understand the right requirements and capabilities throughout the project.
Main Description

Establishing and maintaining agreement with stakeholders about what the system should do is essential for project success. This solution describes practices and tools to identify the right functionality and and early view on major NFRs needed by the stakeholders.

Symptoms

The following symptoms indicate a need for improvement in effectively eliciting requirements:

  • Failure to identify the right set of stakeholders, and the inability to gain their commitment
  • Failure to involve and engage effectively stakeholders in requirements elicitation
  • Lack of agreement on the problem to be solved
  • Designing solutions before the problems are well understood
  • Unable to capture the requirements in multiple forms and representation that effectively communicate to stakeholders
  • Excess effort required to translate requirements into the system design

Tools

  • IBM® Rational® DOORS®
  • IBM® Rational® Rhapsody®
  • IBM® Rational® ReqPro®
  • IBM® Rational® Requirements Composer®
  • IBM® Rational® Team Concert® 

With support from:

  • IBM® Rational® ClearQuest®
  • IBM® Rational® Focal Point®
  • IBM® Rational® Insight®
  • IBM® Rational® Method Composer®

Practices

High Impact:

Medium Impact:

Practice measures

  • High-Level Requirement Stability (Stakeholder Requirement (In)stability)
    • The rate of change of stakeholder requirements over a period of observation
    • e.g. 8 during a 4 week phase = 2/week
  • Requirement Traceability Coverage 
    • The traceability and assessed coverage of System requirements of Stakeholder Requirements(later in the lifecycle)
    • E.g. 90% coverage
    • E.g 5 uncovered Stakeholder requirements

Solution Benefits

The primary focus of this Operational Objective is to Reduce Cost

  • Reduce Engineering cost of direct Systems Engineering and Requirements Engineering effort
  • Reduce Engineering cost of unnecessary change and rework across all disciplines
  • Reduce Engineering expense
  • Reduce the engineering cost of quality
  • Reduce third party expense e.g. Engineering contractor cost
  • In some cases it is possible to reduce or avoid contract penalties that may result from missed or unfulfilled requirements

Included here are the secondary Operational Objectives for this view of:

  • Improve System Quality
    • Reduce and eliminate inconsistent requirements
  • Reduce Time to Value for Systems Development Improvements
  • Reduce time to value for Systems Delivery
    • Better prioritize of requirements