Quality Assurance in Requirements Management - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 102

For validating the requirements specification documents, the group deliberates the
contents and comes to the best possible validation.
6.4.2 Storyboarding
Storyboarding is a technique used in film making in which pictures of the proposed
movie are pinned on the wall sequentially so that the storyline is clear to the
viewers of the pictures. If there are any gaps or absurdities present, they will come
out clearly as well. This technique is used in validating the requirements docu-
ments. Requirements are printed on paper and are pinned in a logical sequence on
a wall or a board. Then selected experts would go through the requirements and
see if the requirements are valid requirements. This technique alleviates the
necessity to read voluminous documents, make sense out of the write-up and
decide the validity of the requirements. This technique is very effective but it
would need extra effort in preparing the storyboard. Some people use a slideshow
or PowerPoint slides to present the story instead of pinning the requirements on a
wall or a board. The experts can view the slideshow any number of times to
validate the requirements. This technique is used across many organizations for
validating requirements.
6.4.3 Prototyping
Prototyping, as discussed in Chap. 5 on establishment of requirements, is used
more to prove design than to establish software project requirements. But a few
organizations still use, in special circumstances, prototypes to establish require-
ments and to validate requirements as well. Prototypes are especially useful in
validating the product specifications (SRS). In product development projects, a
prototype is built and it is demonstrated to select end users to collect their feed-
back. This feedback helps the organization to improve the product design as well.
End users would not be able to visualize aesthetic aspects from requirements
documents, especially of user interfaces of products. And as user interface plays a
vital role in the success of the product, a prototype comes in handy to evaluate the
user interface before we really built it.
6.4.4 Expert Review
Expert in this context is a person who is well versed in the functional domain of
the proposed project or product. In some cases, the customer depends on the
software development organization's expertise to deliver a software product with