Specification Development – part 2, Requirements

Having agreed on the problem or problems to be resolved with the specification, the committee now has to define what will solve the problem. For example, to use a common nursery rhyme, the Use Case is ‘getting water for Liza’ while the requirement is the transportation by Henry of fluid from point ‘a’ to point ‘b’.

Henry could use a variety of options to bring Liza the water and requirements form the basis on which Henry selected the bucket. Some Requirements in this case likely are: must be portable by a single person, sufficient (i.e. minimum and maximum) volume to per unit, able to be lowered and withdrawn from a well, and as the song tells us repairable by the User. We all know that the resulting specification is a bucket, however Henry unfortunately has a hole in that bucket – and the song goes on.

Now that the committee (in this case Henry & Liza) knows what is needed to be able to solve the problem; the next step is figuring out how to solve it – write the specification and that will be Part 3 of this series.