The elicitation, analysis, specification, verification, and validation of requirements for a software project.
Questions tagged [requirements]
379 questions
141
votes
13 answers
What is the difference between requirements and specifications?
I've been tasked with developing requirements and specifications for a project our group is starting.
I realized that I don't know the difference; a Google search just confused me more -- it seems some people say that specifications are…
user39685
130
votes
14 answers
Should the solution be as generic as possible or as specific as possible?
Say I have a entity that has "type" attribute. There could be 20+ possible types.
Now I'm asked to implement something that would allow changing the type from A->B, which is the only use case.
So should I implement something that allows arbitrary…
LoveProgramming
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74
votes
15 answers
How should a developer reject impossible requirements?
Here's the problem I'm facing:
Quote From Project Manager:
Hey Spark, I'm assigning you the task of developing a framework that could be used for many different iOS applications. Here are the requirements:
It should be able to detect the thickness…
sagarkothari
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65
votes
12 answers
How to develop excellent software with agile methods?
The Kano model of customer satisfaction defines different classes of product features. Among them are
Must-be qualities: If these are not implemented the customer will not accept the product.
Attractive qualities (delighters): Features that the…
Frank Puffer
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46
votes
5 answers
Should an e-commerce application reserve products before attempting payment?
I'm designing an e-commerce application and I'm concerned about users occasionally experiencing this:
A user orders a product and is redirected to the payment processor.
While the user is paying, another user orders the product and it's now out of…
paj28
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45
votes
12 answers
Dealing with bad/incomplete/unclear specifications?
I'm working on a project where our dev team gets the specifications from the business part of the company. Both the business management and the IT management require estimates and deadline projections, as they should.
The good thing is that…
eagerMoose
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36
votes
8 answers
Functional or non-functional requirement?
I'm wondering about functional or non-functional requirements. I have found lot of different definitions for those terms and I can't assign some of my requirement to proper category.
I'm wondering about requirements that aren't connected with some…
Piotr Müller
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34
votes
8 answers
User Story vs Requirement
User Story captures what the user wants to do with the system at a high level. I understand that the user story would further drive a number low level requirements. Is user story same as high level requirement for the system?
Punter Vicky
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34
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Best practices for usage of "shall" and "must" when writing requirements
I sent out an email earlier reminding our developers that
the use of the word "shall" in your derived requirements should not follow over to your functional requirements. When writing functional requirements the word "must" is used to describe the…
Tim Lieberman
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33
votes
9 answers
How to reply to incomplete requests from potential customers?
Working as a freelancer, I receive many weird, invalid or incomplete requests from the actual or potential customers. The most frequent case is this one:
Hi,
I need a website where people can register and there are also postings and ratings. How…
Arseni Mourzenko
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28
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Coaxing requirements out of business people?
What methods seem to work best to coax requirements out of non-tech business people? I am working with a team that’s trying to get a spec together for a project. Every time we have met and it comes down to expectations for the next meeting, we ask…
Morgan Herlocker
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27
votes
5 answers
How to deal with stories that share functionality
I have two stories (I know they are missing the benefit part)
As a Credit Management User, I can view the current and previous payroll
differences for Offices.
As a Credit Management User, I can receive an email containing a PDF of the
current…
Joe Young
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26
votes
8 answers
Should "between x and y" be commutative?
In my application there are some predefined expression templates that can be used to filter data. One of them is "between x and y". A QA engineer claims that there is a defect in its definition, because "between 100 and 200" gives different results…
pkalinow
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26
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Is it the job of a developer to suggest IT requirements?
I am the only developer working on a web application which is nearing to its end. Now we are looking into making it Live in maybe a couple of months time.
This is a web application for a non IT company. Though they have their own internal IT team,…
ajm
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25
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7 answers
How can a non-technical person learn to write a spec for small projects?
How can a non-technical person learn to write specs for small projects?
A friend of mine is trying to outsource some development on a statistics project.
In particular, he does a lot of work in excel, and wants to outsource the creation of scripts…
Joseph Turian
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