Rules for Requirements Grammars

December 10, 2009 @ Herding Cats from Glen B. Alleman

Requirements elicitation and engineering is a formal discipline in many domains. A recent paper  "A Method for Identifying Requirements Critical to mass Reduction Using DSMS and DMMS," James M. McLellan, Jonathan R. A. Maier, Georges M. Fadel and Gregory M. Mocko Clemson University, 11th International Design Structure Matrix Conference, DSM’09 12 – 13 October 2009, Greenville, South Carolina, USA.

This list is not only useful for formal Requirements Management (RM) environments, but for a broad set of project management domains.

  • The subject of the requirement must always be a physical or tangible system, subsystem or component and not a property/attribute of a physical artifact. 
  • Requirements with multiple systems must be decomposed into separate requirement statements. 
  • Requirements with multiple verbs must be decomposed into separate requirement statements. 
  • Requirements with exception clauses must be located at the end of the requirement statement. 
  • Requirements with subject description clauses must be located at the end of the statement. 
  • Requirements with clauses describing the direct object must be located immediately after the direct object. 
  • Requirements with clauses that reference other requirements must be located at the end of the statement. The verb ‘to be’ describes a state of being of the subject not an action.

With this grammar, the result is better requirements. Better requirements have been shown to improve the quality of the project's outcomes.

   
 

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This article is syndicated from Project Shrink . The original article is available here. Read more in Project Management News, Project Shrink .


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