Requirement Definition
and Management (3-Day Seminar)

Course Category: Fundamentals
Course Duration: 3 days
Course Credit: 21 PDU
Prerequisites: None

Some people view Requirement Definition and Management as two distinct activities. The first being Requirement Definition which some consider a simple process of merely writing requirements and delivering a written specification. The second is Requirement Management which some believe starts the moment that you get a baselined set of requirements. In reality, the process of Requirements Definition and Management (RD&M) is much more.

RD&M begins when you define and document the scope of your project, validate it with all stakeholders and obtain sign-off. Then with a baselined scope as the foundation, you can elicit, analyze, document and validate your requirements, prepare the requirement specification for review and approval, and once signed off by the stakeholders, baseline. Once baselined, you then apply methods and tools to manage your requirement throughout the lifecycle of the product.

All the fundamentals for effective RD&M are conveyed in this 3-day training course. We take your through the process of Scope Definition, writing requirements and managing requirements, end-to-end.

You will learn:

• Bound the scope of your product and manage to that scope
• Collect the scope information needed so that you can write clear, concise, complete and testable requirements during the requirements phase
• Get buy-in and agreement on your Scope from all stakeholders
• Apply a straight-forward process for eliciting requirements for all phases of your product’s life cycle
• Write requirements to best practices and apply various techniques to avoid writing bad requirements
• Quickly identify and fix bad requirements
• Use rationale to clarify each requirement so that it is understood just one way and you have a history of why the requirement exists for purposes of change impact assessments, maintenance and verification
• Use attributes such as verification method, allocation, and traceability to improve your requirement set
• Write different types of functional and non-functional requirements
• Validate your requirements as they are written to avoid preparing and submitting a bad requirement specification for review
• Determine which attributes are most beneficial to your projects and products
• Create a new, or improve existing, requirement management process
• Conduct continuous reviews to assess the validity of each requirement
• Conduct a key milestone requirement review for purposes of baselining the system requirement specification
• Manage change and collect metrics

Course Objectives

• Learn how to define your project and product scope so that you have a solid foundation for defining, interpreting, and verifying requirements.
• Become knowledgeable of requirement best practices and the tools and techniques for avoiding requirement defects in the first place.
• Learn how to conduct reviews and leverage tools such as checklists to identify and remove requirement defects as requirements are captured.
• Understand the tools and techniques to simplify the process of requirement management.

Course Outline

Day 1: Scope Definition

• How to bound your project (product) by defining its scope
• How to clearly define the need, goals, and objectives for your product
• How to define stakeholders and to involve them in early scope activities
• How to develop operational concepts to ensure complete life-cycle coverage
• How to determine your interfaces
• How to determine if you have a reasonable risk to proceed  to writing requirements

Day 2: Writing Good Requirements

• Understand why we have bad requirements
• How to recognize and write good requirements
• Understand common mistakes when writing requirements
• The value of recording rationale
• Thinking ahead to verification
• Levels, allocation, and tracing requirements
• Documenting requirements – templates
• Writing different types of requirements (Functional and Performance, Operational, Interface, Physical, -ilities, etc.)

Day 3:  Manage Requirements

• Why manage requirements and who manages them
• Document and baseline scope
• Documenting requirements – the return on investment (ROI) associated with capturing and maintaining requirement attributes:
  • Rationale
  • Verification
  • Prioritization
  • Risk
  • Allocation
  • Traceability
• Validate requirements
• Manage Change
• Requirement management methods and tools
• Lessons Learned

Intended Audience

This training is critical for those responsible for capturing and documenting requirements or defining scope. Representatives of all the product’s stakeholders will be involved in developing, reviewing, and approving requirements, and this training will benefit them and your requirement effort.

• System Engineers (SE)
• Requirement Engineers (RE)
• Business Analysts (BA)
• Subject Matter Experts (SME)
• Program and Project Managers (PM)
• Developers
• Testers
• Independent Verification and Validation (IVV) Team
• Customers
• Users
• Marketing
• Those responsible for project scope definition
• Those responsible for requirements management
• Those responsible for setting up and maintaining automated tools
• Those doing process improvement
• Those involved in requirements reviews
• Managers

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