Writing Better Requirements Ian F. Alexander Richard Stevens Ian Alexander
Publisher:

Thought you'd find it of interest. Nearly "two-thirds of all IT projects fail" because of poor requirements. We were agile, we had a Scrum master, we had standup-meetings, we had unit tests, we worked iteratively and met the product owner regularly. After all, if we can't get the requirements right, we're doomed from the start. There are a couple of reasons the simple answer is that no one ever showed us how to write good ones. I wrote this short article for the online project management newsletter Projects@Work. Writing Better Requirements with Examples and Screen Sketches. Why do we have such a hard time writing good requirements? In part 2 we looked at the different parts of an item and discussed some basic requirements for writing a good stimulus and good distractors. Specifications written by a single person do not harness the knowledge and experience of all people on the team, in particular technical people are often left out of the loop. While well-formed requirements should be reusable, the amount of time, care and effort required to write reusable requirements could be better spent doing additional elicitation, analysis or validation. Now it's time to put all of this into practice.